All Chapters of Married To My Ex-Husband's Uncle: Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

151 Chapters

Chapter 131: The Blank Line

Xena."You've got twenty minutes and they'll cut it at twenty," the officer said, and pointed me at table four.Herald was already sitting.Three weeks in the county had gone to five. He'd stopped shaving the way he used to and the county blues fit him worse than the suit had. "You came.""Don't." I put the folder down between us. "Don't do the thing where you sound surprised. It's been five weeks and I've come every week and you know exactly how many times.""Four.""Four." I opened the folder. "I'm going to read you something and then I'm going to ask you something, and I need you to let me get through the first part before you start working on the second.""You've rehearsed this.""In a car park for eleven minutes. Shut up."His mouth moved, barely.I put the photocopy on the table and turned it toward him. "My grandfather. Elias Cross. This was in the sealed material — it's a letter he never sent to anybody. Osei let me copy it."Herald read it. He was quick, and I watched him ge

Chapter 132: The Thirtieth

Xena.The waitress put down two coffees nobody had ordered and left."You always do that," I said."Do what?""Order for me before I've sat down.""You always want coffee." Dante turned his cup around without drinking it. "Should I stop?""No." I pulled mine closer. "I'm stalling. Let me stall for one more minute."He let me.There were four cars in a car park and a fluorescent tube with a fault in it over the counter, and there was a family in the corner booth with a kid asleep across two seats. Two exits. Forty strangers. I'd have picked it too."Okay," I said. "I'll go first.""Go.""I've known you for eight months." I put both hands flat on the table. "In eight months my father died, my sister came back from two years in a locked room, I found out my grandfather founded the thing that killed him, and I watched a man die on the floor of the kitchen I learned to cook in. You were in every one of those rooms.""I was.""So when I say I love you, I don't know how much of that is you a

Chapter 133: Nine Seconds

Xena."You're the Cross girl."The clerk hadn't looked up from her terminal, and I hadn't given her a name."I'm sorry?""Cardigan pocket." She tipped her chin at a folded printout on the counter beside her elbow. "Your face was in the packet they sent round at seven. Media protocol. I've been told not to answer questions and to give you the index if you asked for it.""Who sent a packet round about my face?""Above my pay grade." She clicked twice. "You want to watch it or not? Because I'm doing it at nine either way and I'd rather not have you leaning over the counter when I do."I stepped back a foot. "I'll watch it."She typed something. Looked at the screen. Typed something else."That's it.""That's what?""Case is unsealed. Public docket." She turned the monitor half an inch toward me and turned it straight again. "There's a lag on the press feed. Twenty minutes, maybe less."A hundred and thirty-nine years came off a seal because a woman in a cardigan pressed a key at four min

Chapter 134: Second Row, On The Aisle

Xena."Sit down, Miss Cross, I'm ninety and I'm not standing up again for anybody."He was on the aisle in the second row with a cane hooked over the bench in front of him and a folded newspaper on his knee, and the gallery was still empty behind him at half past twelve.I sat down across the aisle. Dante stayed in the doorway."Your man can come in," Halloway said. "He can stand there if it makes him feel useful, but he can come in.""He's fine where he is.""Yale, isn't it." Halloway didn't turn round. "I knew his grandfather. Wretched man. Used to bid on things at auction he didn't want, purely so other people couldn't have them.""That tracks," Dante said.Halloway unfolded the newspaper and folded it again along a different crease, which seemed to be a thing his hands did while the rest of him worked."I've read your grandfather's letter four times since a quarter to eight," he said. "The one about his name. Is it authentic?""It's in his hand. I've seen the original through glas

Chapter 135: The Caption

Xena."Counsel, I've read four hundred pages since Thursday and I'd like to start by telling you what I'm not going to do."Cheng had her glasses off before anyone had finished sitting down."I'm not going to pretend this is an ordinary sentencing, and I'm not going to pretend the federal matter that unsealed at nine o'clock this morning has nothing to do with the man standing in front of me." She set the glasses on the bench, her patience already thinning. "Both of those pretences would be dishonest and the transcript will show I declined them. Mr. Reyes, your submission."The public defender rose. He was younger than I'd expected for someone carrying this."Your Honor, my client instructed me not to raise mitigation. He's instructed me three times." He planted both hands on the table, a stubbornness in it that hadn't been there in the corridor. "I'm raising it anyway and he can complain about it on appeal.""Noted. Go on.""Herald Cross was raised without a birth certificate. He was

Chapter 136: Don’t Sign It

Xena."Don't sign it."The doors at the back of Cheng's courtroom banged against the stops, and the whole gallery turned at once — sixty heads, one motion, like water tipping in a glass.Halloway's grandson stood in the aisle in a grey suit with rain still on the shoulders. He wasn't looking at the bench. He wasn't looking at Herald, who was standing at the defence table with his hands folded in front of him and a marshal at either elbow.He was looking at the old man in the second row."Grandad." His voice cracked on it, and he didn't care who heard. "Don't sign anything."Cheng didn't raise her voice. She never did."Sir, you will step back through those doors or you will be removed through them," she said, and something in the flatness of it made two people in the front row sit up straighter. "This court is in the middle of a sentencing.""I'm aware of what this court is in the middle of." The grandson came another three steps down the aisle. "That's why I'm here."The marshal near

Chapter 137: Two Names On The Page

Xena."You should have called first."My mother said it with her back to me, at the sink, running water over a mug she'd already washed."You should have called me eleven days ago." I put the petition on the counter between us. "Paragraph nine. Read it.""I've read it.""You've—""Mine came at four." She turned the tap off. "Courier. He knocked twice and waited, which I thought was polite of him."She dried her hands on a towel that had been folded over the oven rail since Dante moved out of this flat, and she did it one finger at a time, and I stood in the doorway of a kitchen with no photographs in it and felt the day catch up with me all at once."You knew this morning," I said."I knew this afternoon.""You let me sit in that courtroom—""I wasn't in that courtroom, Xena." Diana turned around at last. Her hair was still short. She'd cut it herself in a bus station in Toronto eleven months ago with a pair of nail scissors, and it had grown out uneven at the left temple, and she had

Chapter 138: A Room Somebody Built On Purpose

Xena."That's the wrong coffee.""That's the right coffee." Dante put both cups down on the only flat surface in the room, which was a box. "That's what you drink.""That's what I drank in March, when I was living on four hours a night and I needed it to be sweet enough to be a meal." I took the lid off and looked at it. "This is a dessert.""Then don't drink it.""I'm going to drink it.""I know you are." He said it into his own cup, and I heard the smile in it before I saw it, and I turned away so he wouldn't get the satisfaction.Eleven boxes. Eleven, in a room with a radiator that knocked and a south window that had been painted shut by whoever rented the place after me. I'd paid storage on them for fourteen months. I'd walked past this door in June and not stopped."You're not opening them," Dante said."I'm looking at them.""You've been looking at them for twenty minutes.""I'm doing them in order." I crouched down at the end of the row and put my hand flat on the top of the fi

Chapter 139: Subject File

Xena."State your name for the record.""Diana Ruth Cross.""And your relationship to the respondent, Robert James Halloway?""None." My mother's hands were flat on the rail of the box. "I met him once. For fifty minutes. On the twelfth."Courtroom 1804 in the Daley Center has forty seats and about nine people in it. Probate on a Monday morning is a room full of exhausted families and one bailiff who has seen everything. Nobody in there knew what they were sitting in the middle of except the six of us.Robert Halloway was in the second row again. Same coat.Michael sat across the aisle from his grandfather with two feet of public floor between them, which is the closest they'd been since Thursday, and he hadn't looked over once."Mrs. Cross." Michael's lawyer stood up. Priya Raman, forty-something, no notes in her hand. "You filed a sworn affidavit in this matter on Friday evening.""I did.""You filed it voluntarily.""I did.""Nobody compelled you.""Nobody knew," my mother said. "I

Chapter 140: The Ninth Of May

Xena."You didn't know."Michael Halloway said it in the corridor outside 1804 with his back against the wall and a paper cup of water he wasn't drinking.I kept walking."Miss Cross." He came off the wall. "You didn't know.""Don't.""I need you to answer me."I turned round in the middle of a public corridor on the eighteenth floor of the Daley Center, and a man in a suit stepped sideways to get round us, and I heard my own voice come out of me at a volume I don't use."Your lawyer just read my name out of a dead man's ledger," I said. "You've had eleven days to decide what kind of person you are. Decide somewhere else."Michael put the cup down on the window ledge."I've had it since Friday," he said.The corridor kept moving around us. I stopped hearing it."What?""Exhibit F. Four pages. It came in the Friday production with three hundred others." His jaw was working the way his grandfather's had in the courtroom on Thursday, the same muscle, the same place. "I read it Saturday m

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