The Last Time You Chose Her novel · Chapter 22 of 24
Chapter 22: The One Answer
Marta's POV
They had put her in a private room at the end of the hall, with a window onto the parking lot and a police officer on a plastic chair outside the door.
He stood up when he saw me.
"Ma'am."
"I'm her daughter," I said.
He looked at my face for a second, and then at the wet red stains still on my gown.
He sat back down and looked at his shoes.
I had washed my hands in the lobby and scrubbed my nails.
I had not been able to get my mother's blood out of the silk.
I let myself in.
She lay propped on two pillows with her left arm bandaged to the shoulder and a drip taped to the back of her right hand.
Without the black dress and the crucifix and the hair pinned up, she looked smaller.
She looked like somebody's grandmother, in a paper gown.
"Marta," she said.
"Mamma."
I took the chair by the window and set it down at the foot of the bed, six feet from her, and I sat.
She watched me do it.
"You wore Fausta's dress," she said.
"Yes."
"It suited you."
"It was too short."
Something that wasn't quite a smile moved across her face and was gone.
"I came to hear what you want to say," I said. "I told them I would come once."
"I want to say that I am sorry."
The room was quiet except for the pump on the drip.
"I have said it to the ceiling for six weeks," my mother said. "I have said it to your father at the grave. I want to say it to you, to your face. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I looked at you on that table and said what I said."
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