My First Love Returned, His Stand-In Begged Me to Stay novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The Sixth Letter

I drove straight from the lake to Kip's mother's house.

I didn't call first.

She opened the door in her slippers and a cardigan with a tissue in the sleeve, and she looked at me for about two seconds.

"Oh, honey," she said. "He told me."

She put me at the kitchen table and set a plate of lemon bars in front of me, which I think was her way of saying sorry.

"I'm not here to yell at him through you," I said.

"You can if you want."

"I need to ask about the summer I was eighteen."

Her hands stopped on the teapot.

"The summer at the lake," she said slowly.

"You knew him then. Kip. He came home from Lake Wren that August. What was he like?"

She sat down across from me.

"Quiet," she said. "Quieter than I'd ever seen him. He was twenty-one and strong as a horse, and he came through that door and sat on the stairs and didn't speak for a week."

"Did he say why?"

"He said it was nothing. I knew it wasn't." She turned her cup on the saucer. "And after that he started doing whatever Constance asked. Every favor. Every Sunday dinner. He's been jumping when my sister snaps her fingers since he was twenty-one years old."

"Why?"

"I never found out." She looked at the window. "She pays for things for me. Doctors. The roof. I kept thinking he was paying her back for something."

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