Wash Her Feet novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Sixteen Years

I came down the stairs in my father's old bathrobe, and my whole kitchen was lit.

Shelby sat at the table where Dad and I had eaten breakfast for twenty years.

She had put the black ledger down in front of her and laid the faded key beside it.

Lance stood by the refrigerator with his phone held up.

Rafe stood between them and the stairs, and he looked at me once, and his face was gray.

"Sit, sweetheart," Shelby said. "I promised I'd tell you everything."

"Get out of my house," I said.

"After."

"Lance is filming," Rafe said, in a low flat voice.

"Let him," Shelby said. "I'd like it on the record."

I did not sit.

I stood at the end of the table with both hands on the back of a chair.

"Sixteen years ago," Shelby began, "a girl transferred into your sixth-grade class with nothing but a trash bag of clothes."

"I remember," I said.

"You sat next to me at lunch."

"You had no one."

"I picked you," she said.

The kitchen clock ticked.

"There were thirty kids in that cafeteria," Shelby said, "and you were the one with a lunchbox that had BRADSTREET HOMES stamped on the lid. Your father gave them out at job sites. I had read that name on a letter in my caseworker's file at nine years old, and I had memorized it. I sat down next to the lunchbox."

My hand tightened on the chair.

"Nineteen years ago today," she said, "my mother went up the back stairs of a Bradstreet apartment building with a laundry basket, and the stairs came off the wall."

Rafe had not moved.

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