Chapter 14: The Tape

The tape ran on for another half minute, and nobody breathed through any of it.

My father's voice begged my mother to wake up.

Then there was only hiss, and the click of a machine shutting itself off.

I had spent nine years hunting a woman in a cream suit.

It had never occurred to me to look at the man who gave me my mouth.

I stood in my mother's crown with the microphone going cold in my hand.

I could not feel my knees.

Then my father broke.

"She was giving it all to that girl!"

He said it to the stands, to the whole mile, with his hands open.

"The land, the stud book, every acre her people ever owned.

"She was going to sign it on Monday, and I would have had nothing.

"Nothing, do you hear?

"I had my name on a gate and nothing under it!"

A woman in the third row began to cry out loud.

On the rail, someone said, "My God," and kept saying it.

Nicolette had come up the steps behind me.

She stood with her whip hanging from her hand and her mouth open, looking at the man who had raised her since she was fifteen.

"Warrick," she said.

It was the first time I had ever heard her call him anything but Daddy.

He did not hear her.

He stared at me, and the farmer's voice was gone from him completely.

"You have her mouth," he said.

"You always had it."

Jude was beside me before I knew he had crossed the grass.

He did not touch me.

He simply stood on my left, close enough that I could feel his heat, and I took the first full breath since the tape began.

Keep reading free with an account. Start After Being Kicked Out, I Became the Queen My Family Can't Reach from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.