They Voted to Replace Me at My Own Wedding novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: What He Paid

By evening Roxanne's sister was asleep in a guest room on the second floor, with a private nurse and a real oxygen machine.

I checked her pulse twice myself, and the nurse let me.

Then I went looking for Marcello.

His men had brought their dead boy home to his mother in the afternoon, and Marcello had gone with them.

He had come back at dusk and gone into his study, and nobody had followed him.

I found his mother in the hall outside the door, in her black shawl, holding a worn leather box against her chest.

"He will not show you this," she said. "I am old, and I am finished with fools."

She put the box in my arms.

"Read it before you go in."

I sat on the stairs and opened it.

On top lay a stack of bank statements from a fund called the Keane Memorial Trust.

I had never heard of it.

The first payment, three years ago in April, was to a funeral home: the casket, the flowers, the headstone, and every folding chair at the back of the chapel.

I remembered thinking the director had been kind to me.

The second was my student loan, forty-one thousand dollars, paid in full the autumn after Eli died.

I had read the letter from the loan company a dozen times.

It said "clerical adjustment."

Below that came the brakes on my old Honda, the month my car died on the interstate and a stranger towed it for free.

My landlord's "mistake" on a winter's rent.

Twenty-two months of it.

I turned the page, and the payments stopped.

The last one was dated the day before I said yes in my kitchen.

A card was clipped to it, in Marcello's black square handwriting.

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