My Husband Hung Up on Me the Night I Gave Birth novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: August Fourteenth

I sent Mama and Bean into the bakery next to the bistro and told her to keep the door in sight.

Then I got into the passenger seat of my husband's car and waited.

Ryan came out of the restaurant eight minutes later.

He walked slowly to the car, got in, and put both hands on the wheel.

He didn't start the engine. He didn't look at me.

"You heard," he said.

"All of it."

"Erin..."

"Tell me what happened. Not what she said. What you did."

He stared through the windshield for a long time.

"I was twenty-eight," he said. "A year on Major Crimes. Hal was my training partner. There was a call about a man with a gun behind a liquor store on Dutton Street."

He swallowed.

"It was dark. A boy stepped out from behind a dumpster with his arm up and something in his hand, and he turned toward me."

"And you shot him."

"Twice."

My hands went cold.

"It was a phone, Erin. He was filming us. He was twenty years old and he was holding his phone."

"Whose brother was he?"

"Gwen's." He shut his eyes. "I didn't know that until I got to the morgue. She was my fiancée. I was supposed to marry her in the spring."

I said nothing, and he went on in a voice with all the air gone out of it.

"Hal found me on the curb. He said, listen to me. We saw a gun. We recovered a gun. He took one out of his trunk, and he wrote it all down, and he put the pen in my hand, and I signed."

"You signed a lie."

"I signed it. I was a rookie, and I was sick, and he said it was the only way I kept my badge. Everyone said the boy was a thug. Gwen wouldn't hear it. She thought he'd been railroaded. I told her I'd look into it."

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