What We Called Therapy After Dark novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: His Name

The garden waited.

Forty people had gone quiet, and every face was turned toward me.

My mother stood with her chin up and her hands loose at her sides.

She believed she had landed the last blow.

Maybe she had.

I was eighteen years old, in the dress my mother had bought, and I had never said it out loud.

"You're right," I said.

I heard a soft gasp from my aunt.

"I'm eighteen," I said. "I'm a grown woman. I was never forced, and he never took one thing from me that I didn't give."

My voice carried further than I expected.

"For six years I watched this man fix our roof, drive me to school and sit through every one of my bad recitals. He never once asked me for anything. Not once."

I turned to look at Mitch.

He was standing by the stand with the laptop in his arms, as pale as I had ever seen him.

"I was the one who walked across the grass to the garage at night," I said. "I chose him. That is the only part of this summer that was mine."

Somewhere behind me, someone started to cry.

I looked at my mother again.

"You told me he's still my stepfather," I said. "He is. He was a good one for six years. And I choose him anyway, and nobody in this garden gets a vote."

My mother's face did not change.

But I saw her breath catch.

Mitch put the laptop down on the cake table.

He walked across the grass toward me, in front of forty people, in a shirt my mother had ironed.

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