The Unsent Appeal novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: You Stayed

Rose's POV

He knocked at eight that night.

I opened the door in a sweatshirt, with my hair wet from the shower.

Elliott stood in the hall.

He had no rules and no careful face.

He looked like a man who had run up three flights of stairs on a bad leg.

"I went to see your brother," he said.

"Why?"

"To tell him you didn't owe him anything."

I stepped back to let him in, because I couldn't think of anything else to do.

He didn't sit.

"I heard his voice," he said. "And I was back on the road."

I felt the floor tilt.

"You said his name that night," Elliott said, very low.

I couldn't speak.

"Dean," he said. "He ran. You stayed."

"Elliott."

"He was the one driving."

I sat down on the arm of the couch, because my knees had quit.

For eight years I had practiced not saying it.

I had practiced in the shower, on the train, in the dark.

It came out of me in one piece.

"He'd been drinking at a party. We both had, but I only had one beer."

"He wanted to drive, and I let him."

"Rose."

"He was nineteen. He had a baseball scholarship and a coach who loved him."

"He took the corner, and you were in the road, and it was so fast."

My voice broke.

"He ran. I knelt down, and your leg was wrong, and the blood came through my hands."

"I wasn't going to leave you."

Elliott had come to kneel in front of me.

His hands were on my knees.

"At the hospital, my mother sat me down in the family room," I said.

"She said Dean would lose everything. She said I had nothing to lose."

"She said it would be easier on everyone if the driver were me."

"And you said yes."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Unsent Appeal from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.