They Left Me Out of the Family Pack Chat, So I Left Them Out of My Future novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: To Family

The tent stood on the lawn, with lanterns strung down its sides.

Inside the lake house, forty people sat at one long table with place cards.

Mine was at the head, to my father's right.

Quinn walked in behind me in the one jacket he owned.

"He's my plus-one," I told Roz at the door.

"Of course." She kissed my cheek. "How lovely."

Her hand was cold.

My father had on a navy blazer and a new face.

It was warm and wide and it didn't hold a trace of the hospital lobby.

My mother sat at the far end and didn't look up.

Ewan took the chair beside me, and Quinn the one beside him, and I felt them both through my sleeves.

Roz's fiancé sat across the table, with his parents on either side.

His mother nodded to me once.

The salmon came out.

I ate none of it.

At seven-thirty my father stood and tapped his glass with a knife.

"Friends," he said. "Family."

The table went quiet.

He took a sheet of paper out of his blazer and unfolded it.

The same typed paragraph I'd read in Quinn's kitchen.

He looked straight at me over the top of it.

"Tonight I'd like to tell you all something I should have said thirty-one years ago."

Roz put her hand on her heart.

"A young man made a choice. He wasn't brave enough to keep it. His brother Dennis stepped in, and raised a daughter better than he could have, and left us too soon."

"And tonight I want to say, in front of everyone I love, that Rosalind is my child."

A noise went around the table.

Somebody gasped on cue.

Someone began to clap.

My mother kept her hands in her lap.

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