The Photo Said I Must Die novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Garden Party

We walked down to the shingle beach, and Oliver didn't say a word until the inn was behind a bend in the cliff.

The tide was out.

Gulls stood in the wet sand in a row, and a lobster boat bumped slowly in the harbor.

My hand throbbed inside its bandage, and I could still feel exactly where Judd's thumb had been on my wrist.

I put that away for later.

"I owe you an apology," Oliver said.

"You owe me a phone."

"It's in the car. I'll get it." He rubbed his face with both hands. "I took it out of your hand in front of forty people, and I clapped when you gave it to me. I didn't want to see it. That's on me."

"It is."

"I know."

He stopped walking, and I stopped too.

He was thirty-three, and he sold commercial insurance, and he had always been kind to me in the way you're kind to a sister-in-law you haven't known long.

That morning he looked like a man who had been awake since the garden.

"Briana told me about the camera the week we got engaged," he said. "She said you were going to die at twenty-six, and that you'd never be able to hear it, so she'd carried it alone since she was fifteen."

"She was fifteen?"

"She said she found the envelopes in your mother's desk while your mother was sick." He looked at the water. "She asked me to stay. She said nobody else in her life had ever stayed. I said yes. I would have said yes to anything, Dani. I loved her. I do."

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