Chapter 7: The Gate

Talbot was standing at the Trezevant gate at ten that night, in the rain, without an umbrella.

The guard called up to the house, and Eleanor's voice said to send me down.

I went in a raincoat and Rhona's old boots, with a flashlight in my fist.

He looked ten years older than he had in the garden.

"Dad's okay," he said, before I could ask. "It was his heart. They kept him overnight."

"I'm sorry."

"You don't have to be."

"I'm sorry for anyone in a hospital bed, Talbot. It isn't a gift to you."

He took that without flinching.

The rain ran down his face, and I stood on the dry side of the iron bars.

"I came to say something," he said. "I practiced it in the car, and I can't remember it."

"Then say what's left."

He gripped the bars with both hands.

"I picked a name," he said.

My throat closed.

"I picked it in the waiting room at your twelve-week visit, while you were in with the doctor."

"I didn't tell you because I wanted to surprise you."

"Don't."

"When we found out she was a girl, I never changed it. She was going to be Rose."

I put the flashlight down on the wet stone because my hand would not hold it.

My mother's name, in his mouth, was the cruelest thing he had ever done to me, and he had done it out of love.

"I believed that paper because my mother put it in my hand," he said. "That's no excuse. I'm telling you what happened."

"Who picked the lab?"

"Camille did. She gave my mother the name and the address, and said it was where her family's doctor sent blood work."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Bad-ass Heiress Returns After Divorce from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.