They Excluded Me From the Family, So I Built a New One novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: Lemon Cake

Kenzie's fiancé and his mother came to Cambridge on Thursday at ten.

I had cleaned the kitchen twice, which was how I knew I was nervous.

The fiancé was a quiet young man in a pressed shirt, and he stopped inside the door and wiped his feet three times.

His mother carried a lemon cake in a box.

"I should have called first," she said. "Then I'd have had time to be embarrassed on the phone instead of in your house."

"You're welcome here," I said.

"I'm not sure I am. I asked your husband, in front of you, whether your cottage was his."

"You asked a fair question."

"I asked it of the wrong person." She set the cake on the counter. "May I sit?"

I put her at the oak table, and Kenzie slid into the chair beside the young man and took his hand without looking at it.

Libby stayed at the stove, pretending to watch a kettle.

Carl's envelope lay in the middle of the table.

"I read these on the drive down," the mother said, and put her palm flat on a sheaf of printed emails. "Mrs. Pierce sent them to me. I thought you should see how she wrote to us."

I picked up the top page.

Rosalie's voice came off it as warm as ever.

Poor Susannah had been so overworked, she had written, that the family was worried about her.

The cottage deed was a tangled matter, the kind of thing that happened when a grieving daughter held on to a mother's property too long.

The wedding deserved a clean start.

A contribution of ninety thousand dollars toward the venue would settle everything, and she would handle the rest herself.

"She asked you for ninety thousand dollars," I said.

"She asked for it on Sunday. At nine at night."

"Did you send it?"

"No." The mother looked at her son. "My husband wanted to. He said families help each other. I said we'd wait to hear from Kenzie."

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