The Wedding She Survived novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Her Own Mother

I carried the stub and the letters down to the kitchen and laid them on the table, side by side.

Then I sat in my chair and waited for my mother's car.

The kids were asleep upstairs, all three, sprawled across the big bed with the door cracked open.

At ten past three, the front door opened.

"Willa? They were giving away a perfectly good ironing board," my mother called. "Are you home, baby?"

She came into the kitchen with her purse on her arm.

She saw the table.

She stopped in the doorway, and she did not gasp, and she did not say my name.

She set her purse down on the counter.

She took off her reading glasses, and she let them hang on their cord.

"I told you to leave it alone," she said.

Not to me.

She meant Killian.

"Mom," I said. "Say something else."

"Sit tight, baby. Let me put the kettle on."

"Don't touch the kettle!"

My voice came out so loud that she flinched.

Upstairs, a floorboard creaked, and we both held still.

Nobody came down.

"Two million dollars," I said, quietly now. "Endorsed to you. The week of my wedding."

"Yes."

"You said you threw out the check."

"I threw out the copy."

"You said the courier came in the afternoon."

"It came in the morning." She said it flatly, with no pause. "Nine-forty. A man in a gray jacket, who wanted my signature twice."

"And the letters?"

She looked at the fourteen sealed envelopes.

I picked up the top one.

The postmark was Hamburg, eight days after my wedding.

"They came every month for over a year, and then they stopped," my mother said. "I put each one in the chest the day it arrived."

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