They Sold Me, Then My Dead Mother Came to Take Me Home novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Ten Minutes

I walked out to the road on my own feet.

I used the cane, and I stopped three times, and each time Jonas stayed exactly one pace behind me and kept his hands at his sides.

Janet stood on the porch with her arms folded.

Two of the ranch hands had drifted over to the fence line, and neither pretended to be doing anything else.

"I want witnesses," I said.

"Ten minutes," my mother said. "That's all I asked."

"Then you can say it in front of them."

She stood in the road in the cream coat with her white gloves folded, and for the first time I saw that her face was tired.

"Very well," she said. "Your father borrowed against the mill for years."

"I know. I read the books."

"You read half of them. He borrowed against your grandmother's trust too, and then he borrowed against his life insurance, and then against mine."

"Yours?"

"The policy had three million dollars in it," my mother said. "On my death."

I stared at her.

"You faked it," I said.

"I arranged it. A man in Spokane signed a certificate. A friend of your father's buried a box. It was clean, and quick, and it paid out the week after the funeral, and the mill stayed open another year."

"You let me put a rose on it."

"You were a sentimental child."

"I was nineteen!"

"And it was necessary," she said, in the same level voice. "I would have lost everything. So would you."

The old hand at the fence let out a short, ugly breath.

"And then I found the books," I said.

"And then you found the books, and you took them to a sheriff who had a brother in the mill. You would have unraveled the insurance, Mara. You would have unraveled me."

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