After Ninety-Nine Lies, My Husband Finally Told Me the Truth novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: I'm Not Coming Home

"How far along?" Margit said.

"Eight weeks and three days."

"Does my son know?"

"No."

She nodded once and set the picture on the kitchen table, smoothing the curl out of it with her thumb.

Her hands were old and spotted, and I had never seen them shake.

"I came to bring you this," she said.

She took a loaf wrapped in a dish towel out of her coat.

"Rye. It's Henrik's mother's."

"Thank you."

"Sit down, Cora. You look as if you'll fall."

I sat.

She took the other chair, and we looked at each other across my grandmother's oilcloth.

I had waited five years for her to look at me that way.

It was not what I had imagined.

"For five years Signe told me things about you," Margit said. "Small things, at first. That you were secretive. That you said one thing to Anders and another to me. I didn't like you. I'll say that plainly."

"I know."

"I thought you took my son from me. I thought a good woman would have been easier. So when she came with her little stories I did not ask for proof."

"Margit."

"Let me say it." She lifted a hand. "I'm too old to say it twice."

I waited.

"At the dinner, when she asked me whether you'd called me on Christmas Eve, I knew you had. You called me every year. You called me from the hospice break room, with the monitors going, and you asked about my knee."

"I did."

"And I said I didn't recall."

Her voice dropped.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because for a moment I was afraid of her," she said. "My own daughter. In my dining room. I looked at her face and I was afraid of her. I have not stopped being afraid since."

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