He Counted My Lies Until I Died, Then Begged Me to Wake novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: Entry One Hundred

Rhona's POV

The boardroom on Monday was full.

Eleven directors sat at the long table, and the old dispatcher and forty others stood along the walls.

Someone had replaced the crystal carafe.

I sat at the table in my beige coat with Dorinda on my left and my lawyer on my right, and the divorce petition in front of me.

Winslow stood at the head of the table.

He had the Lie Book in one hand and a pen in the other.

He did not look at the directors.

He looked at me.

"Thank you for coming," he said. "This won't take long."

He opened the book to the last page, set it on the table, and read aloud what he had already written at the top.

"Entry one hundred. Said by Winslow Holloway."

Nobody moved.

"Five years ago I married Rhona Dolan," he said. "In the fifth year I started this book. I wrote down ninety-nine things she told me, and next to each I wrote LIE. I want everybody in this room to hear what I wrote next to it in pencil, where nobody could see."

He turned the book toward them and held it up.

"A tick, and the word True. Ninety-nine times."

A few of the directors looked at their hands.

"This is the hundredth," Winslow said.

He bent over the page and began to write, and he said each word out loud as the pen went down.

"On a Tuesday afternoon she called me from the bottom of our stairs. She said she was dying. I said, Ninety-nine."

His voice caught.

He went on.

"That was not a lie she told. It was the truest thing she ever said to me. I answered it with a number."

The pen scratched.

"The lie in this book was never hers. It was mine. I told myself I was protecting her. I was protecting me."

I heard Dorinda's sharp breath.

"I drugged her. I called her a liar so she would never believe herself. I stood there while my mother poisoned her. I was her husband, and I was the worst thing in her house."

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