They Raised the Wrong Girl, So Five Brothers Came for Me novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Two Hours Down the Highway

Finbar didn't come into the sunroom.

He stood in the doorway with his hand on the frame, looking at the wren in its velvet box.

"Grandmother," he said.

"Sit down, Finbar."

"I'll stand."

"Then stand," she said. "You always did sulk on your feet."

Eliana made a small noise that might have been a laugh, and then she looked mortified.

"Sorry," she said. "I'm so sorry. I'll go."

"You'll stay," the old woman said. "You are the reason for this."

She turned her face back to her grandson, and her voice was the one she used for settling accounts.

"I had a daughter. She married a cook at twenty-two, and I told her not to come back, and she took me at my word."

Finbar didn't move.

"You told me she died in Lisbon."

"I told your father that, and he believed it for a week. Then he spent eleven years proving me a liar, and I let him, and I never once said, you were right to look."

"And me?"

"I told you the same story because it was the one I had already told," she said. "Pride is cheaper than a phone call. I have been paying for it since you were nine."

I stood by the sofa with my hands in my sleeves.

Finbar looked at his grandmother for a long time.

"She was alive for twenty-four years," he said. "Two hours down the highway."

"Yes."

"My father died looking for her."

"Yes."

"And you knew Hattie was her daughter on Sunday, and you let me drive her around this city for four days."

"I asked her to," said his grandmother. "She did not like it."

That was true, and it didn't help me at all.

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