They Sold Me, Then My Dead Mother Came to Take Me Home novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Witness

Jonas's POV

Thea Eckhart walked to the bench in her navy dress, and I stood up to stop her.

I had no right to stop anyone in that room.

I stood anyway, and Mara put two fingers on the rail of the witness stand and looked at me, and I sat down.

"Mrs. Eckhart," the judge said. "You were declared dead eight years ago."

"I was not dead, Your Honor. I was in Spokane."

The room made a sound I had never heard a room make.

Ernest Eckhart was on his feet before the clerk finished swearing her in.

"Thea," he said. "Sit down."

"No."

She did not look at him.

"I faked my death for three million dollars of life insurance," she said. "My husband borrowed against it before I was in the ground. He signed the loans. He kept a second set of books for twenty years."

"She's confused," Ernest told the judge. "She hasn't been well."

"I have never been clearer," Thea said.

She turned her head, finally, and looked at him.

"You signed the paper that sold our daughter, Ernest. Your name is on it. Mine is not."

That was a lie, and I knew it.

My father's green ledger had a line in it that said the buyer was called by a woman.

Mara knew it too. She stood at the stand with her knuckles white on the rail and said nothing.

I understood what I was watching.

Thea Eckhart was going under.

She had picked the one person in the room she could push down to keep herself up.

It was working.

"Your Honor," Corbin's lawyer said. "My client has nothing to do with his parents' arrangements."

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