On Halloween, My Husband Chose Her Family Over Ours novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Birthday

I went to the birthday lunch because Maddie asked me to.

"She's still my grandma," she said on Friday night, with her sketchbook open in her lap. "It's her sixty-fifth. I made her a card."

It was a good card.

It showed a woman in a garden with a cake bigger than the house.

So on Saturday I put on a green dress that still closed over my stomach, and I held my daughter's hand, and Ben met us in the parking lot of the restaurant.

"You don't have to do this," he said.

"I know."

"I'll sit beside you. If it goes bad, we leave."

"You said you don't date clients."

"This isn't a date," he said. "It's a witness."

"Is it?"

"It's me standing near you in case somebody tries to hand you a legal document at a birthday party." He held the door open. "Go in."

The function room was long and warm, with paper lanterns and a banner that said HAPPY 65TH BIRTHDAY.

There were four round tables and a head table across the back, and about forty people.

Aunts and uncles, cousins, two old men from Derek's father's church.

Every one of them looked up when I walked in, and then looked at my daughter, and then very carefully at something else.

Derek's mother was at the head table in a plum-colored dress.

Derek sat on her right.

On her left, in a navy blouse with her hair pinned up neatly, sat Colleen.

Lily was beside her, with a napkin tucked into her collar.

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