Reborn, I Gave My Daughter to His Mistress novel · Chapter 19 of 24
Chapter 19: The Front Row
Delaney came to the dedication in a plain black dress, and she took the last chair in the back row.
I saw her from the lectern.
Two hundred folding chairs stood in the hospital garden. The board chair had just finished thanking my family for forty years of giving.
A banner hung over the new stone bench: THE OTIS GARDEN.
Cora sat in the front row beside Simon.
She had seen Delaney too, and she turned her face to the front and kept it there.
I gripped the lectern.
"Thank you," I said. "My father would have hated this. He liked his name on things only when he was the one paying."
A few people laughed.
"He gave to this hospital because my mother spent her last years in it. I thought I knew everything he did with his money."
I looked up, past all the faces, to the black dress at the back.
"I was wrong."
The garden went still.
"My father had two daughters. I learned that three weeks ago, in my own kitchen. The second one is sitting in the last row."
A murmur ran through the chairs.
People turned in their seats.
I saw them find her. Then I saw them understand who she was, because half this garden had seen her in the silver gown at the foundation dinner, beside my husband.
"That's the mistress," a woman near the aisle whispered, loud enough to carry.
Delaney did not move.
"Yes, she did that too," I said, into the microphone. "She took my husband and tutored my daughter, and she made sure my girl cheated her way through two years of school. I will not pretend otherwise, and neither will she."
I let it sit.
"But nine years ago, she stood in the back row of my father's funeral, and nobody asked who she was. Nobody is going to make her stand there again."
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