My Husband, My Sister: A Secret Betrayal novel · Chapter 28 of 32

Chapter 28: What She Owes

I didn't think.

I went over the guardrail in my good sandals and landed on the wet rock beside my sister.

"Laura," Daniel shouted.

"Stay on the road. If she lets go, I want one of us still standing."

Claire's eyes slid to me.

The lake lay flat and gray below us, a long way down.

"You don't get to do this," I said. "You don't get to leave me holding it."

"Holding what?"

"Three years of Sundays. A town that just heard your voice. Two kids who think you're their aunt."

Her mouth shook.

"They'll hate me."

"Teddy might, someday. Bea will ask where you went." I held out my hand. "You took my phone and my memory and my husband's name. You are not taking the end of this story, too."

She looked at my hand for a long time.

Then Daniel's arms came down past my shoulder, over the rail, and closed on her elbow.

She didn't fight.

We lifted her up between us, over the cold metal, and she sat down on the gravel shoulder with her knees pulled in and cried.

A sheriff's car came around the curve with its lights going.

Winnie had called it.

The deputy knelt, and spoke low, and Claire nodded at every word.

When they walked her to the car she turned her head.

"Laurie."

"No," I said.

"I didn't ask yet."

"You were going to ask me to forgive you. No."

Her face went still.

She got in the back of the car, and it pulled away down the lake road.

I stood on the shoulder and waited to feel something larger.

What I felt was tired, and sore from the rock, and very much alive.

"That's it?" I said. "That's the end of her?"

"No," Daniel said. "That's the end of it being a secret."

We picked up the kids from Winnie at five.

She'd sent the caseworker home with a slice of lemon cake and a signed statement from forty neighbors.

Teddy asked where Aunt Claire was, and I told him the truth in plain words.

He thought about it, with his dinosaur backpack on.

"Is she going to be okay?"

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