The Billionaire's Rescue novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Chapel

There is one place Agnes goes when she can't stand to be anywhere else.

The old east wing of St. Anne's has been closed for eleven years, but the chapel on the ground floor still has a key under a flowerpot.

Every January ninth, my birthday, she takes an hour off and goes there by herself.

She says she's saying thank you.

I never asked for what.

Torben drove me there in the dark with the heater on high.

He didn't say a word the whole way, and I loved him a little for it.

At the chapel door he said, "I'll be right here."

"You don't have to."

"I know. I'm going to be anyway."

I went in alone.

It was a small room with eight pews and a wooden cross and a smell of old candles.

A single lamp burned over the altar.

Agnes sat in the second pew with the green suitcase at her feet and her coat buttoned to her chin.

She did not turn around.

"You found me," she said. "You always do."

I sat down on the pew next to her.

She looked tiny.

I had never noticed how small my mother was, because she'd always filled every room with her opinions.

"Tell me," I said.

She breathed in.

"I was twenty-eight," she said. "I'd worked nights on the maternity floor for three years. I had you in January, in this building. You were born at nine-forty at night."

"That's the story you always told me."

"It's not the whole story."

Her hands were knotted in her lap.

"I had a baby girl that night. She was blue around the mouth. A good doctor listened to her chest and said her heart was wrong. Not a little wrong. The pipes were crossed."

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