The Video Called Me His Mistress, But I Was His Wife novel · Chapter 11 of 24
Chapter 11: The Rest of It
Hazel's POV
Lakeview was a low white building with a garden and a nurse who held the door for me.
She held it as if she had been told to.
Ruby had followed in her own car and was parking behind me.
I didn't wait.
My mother sat in a chair by a window with a blanket over her knees and her gray braid over one shoulder.
Her eyes were clearer than they had been in two years.
"Hazel," she said. "You came."
I knelt and put my face in her lap.
She stroked my hair with the hand that shook.
"Mama. Did he hurt you?"
"No, baby. He's been very polite."
"Why does your phone work? Why are you clear today?"
"I stopped the medicine," she said. "I've been spitting it in the plant. I've been waiting for you for a week."
I lifted my head.
She looked at me with a sorrow so patient I knew it had been waiting for years.
"I need to tell you about your father's shop, and you won't like me when I'm done."
"Mama."
"I signed it, Hazel."
The room was very quiet.
A bird landed on the sill outside the window and left.
"He was in the hospital. They wanted a deposit. Mr. Prescott said if I signed, the bills would go away. Your father woke up and looked at the paper and never said a word to me about it."
"You let me think he died in debt."
"I let you think he died as himself. I thought it was kinder."
"It wasn't kind."
"I know that now."
I stood up.
I did not know where to put my hands.
"Six years," I said. "I took a desk outside your office, and a year later I put on a gray dress and married his son to get at that man."
"I know."
"You know?"
"Ruby told me. Last month." My mother smiled very faintly. "You think I'd have let you walk into that building and never ask what you were hunting?"
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