On Thanksgiving, My Husband Left Me 7 Months Pregnant at a Highway Rest Stop novel · Chapter 23 of 24
Chapter 23: The Care Home
The county courtroom in February smelled like radiators and wet wool.
I sat in the second row with the baby in a carrier against my chest, and Jonas sat on my left in his uniform.
Delaney sat on my right with her mother's wheelchair pulled up at the end of the row.
Her mother was a small woman in a pink cardigan, with one hand curled against her lap.
She had been told everything on the drive over, in the slow careful words Delaney used with her.
She had said only one thing back.
"He was a good man," she had said, about her husband. "Make them say it in there."
Dennis stood at the front table with his lawyer.
He had lost thirty pounds in a month.
He wore the suit from the church hall, and it hung on him.
The judge read the charges: leaving the scene of a fatal crash, vehicular homicide, and the concealment that came after.
"How do you plead, Mr. Tolliver?"
"Guilty."
He said it clearly.
He turned his head, and for the first time in twelve years he looked straight at Delaney's mother.
"I am sorry for the man I killed," he said. "I am sorry every day. I should have stopped."
Delaney's mother moved her good hand on the arm of her chair.
It might have been a nod. It might have been nothing.
The prosecutor rose and said that the defendant had also signed over the whole of Tolliver Motors, the land, the inventory and the building, to a trust for the care of Mrs. Brooks for the rest of her life.
"Any surplus goes to the victim's family," she said.
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