System Erased Her From My Memory novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The Back Doors

The Lakeside chapel is a white wooden box with a glass back wall and a lake behind it.

In October it was empty and locked, and the grass outside was stiff with frost.

Delaney was sitting on the stone steps of the back doors with her coat pulled around her knees.

She didn't look surprised to see me.

"I come here at four every afternoon," she said. "I don't know why. It's not like they're going to open."

"The system sent me."

"The voice?"

"It said payment two is open."

She stood up fast.

Her face was bare, no makeup, and she looked about nineteen.

"What do I have to say?"

"What you took from me. Out loud. To me."

"That's all?"

"That's what it said."

She wrapped her arms around herself.

Then she took a step down and stood on the grass, a few feet away.

"I took three years," she said. "I took them one morning at a time, and I never counted."

"That's one."

"I took the fact that you were proud of me. You used to tell the front desk I'd done well when I'd done nothing. I let you. I liked it."

I said nothing.

"I took your job." Her voice shook. "You were the best coordinator that hotel ever had, and the day I ran, my father's people let you quit because it was easier than firing the groom."

"Keep going."

"I took your voice." She pulled the phone out of her pocket and held it a moment without playing it. "You recorded that in our kitchen to make me laugh. I used it at your wedding as a weapon. I made you hear yourself like a stranger."

"That one was bad."

"I know." She laughed, a small, broken noise. "And I took the last thing, Wes. I took the morning. You trusted me with a day I should have been brave in. I was in the hall in my dress at nine a.m. and I was texting another man that you were my charity case."

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