Lahat ng Kabanata ng My Husband Married Me For Revenge : Kabanata 61 - Kabanata 70

Audrey's POVWe took the tapes back to the lake house because there was nowhere else.Reid drove. Blair followed in her own car, close enough that I could see her hands on the wheel in the mirror, white at the knuckles. Neither of us said a word for six minutes. When we pulled in, every window in the house was lit.Thane was on the porch. Vivienne stood behind him with her arms crossed.He'd never met his daughter in daylight, I realized. Not once, not properly. He had watched her grow up from a distance and sent money through a lawyer and a hand-written letter every week, and the two of them had shared a room maybe a dozen times, and never as father and daughter.Blair got out of her car and stopped at the bottom of the steps.They looked at each other. They had the same jaw. I'd never noticed until now, in the porch light."Hello, Blair," Thane said."Hello."That was all for a while."I read your letters," she said finally. "All of them. On my mother's closet floor.""I know.""You

Reid's POVI didn't move. Nobody in that kitchen moved.The voice came again, patient as a metronome. "I know you can hear me. I'd rather not say the rest of this through a door."Blair's knuckles had gone white around the cedar box. Audrey's eyes found mine across the room, and I understood the question in them without her saying it: do we answer, or do we run.We couldn't run. My father was in the cellar. Vivienne was in the cellar. If whoever was on that porch decided to force the issue, there was nowhere left to put them."Reid." Thane's voice, low, from the kitchen doorway. He'd gone still in a way I hadn't seen from him all night, not fear exactly. Recognition. "I know that voice.""Who is it?"He didn't answer. He was already moving toward the front hall, and something in his face made me follow instead of stopping him.He opened the door himself.She was smaller than the voice had suggested, silver-haired, seventy maybe, in a cardigan the color of weak tea, holding a canvas to

Reid's POVThe silence stretched long enough that I heard the car outside shift, engine ticking, Dorothy waiting exactly where she said she would."Say something," Audrey said. Her voice had gone very quiet, which was worse than if she'd shouted. "Anything. Tell him he's wrong."Thane didn't turn from the door. "I can't."My father made a sound I'd never heard from him before, not in thirty-one years of knowing him as my father and, before that, as a name I'd grown up hating. It wasn't anger. It was closer to grief, the kind that arrives late and finds you unprepared for it twice."Fourteen months," he said. "I was still alive fourteen months before I disappeared, Thane. You could have warned me. You could have picked up a phone.""And told you what?" Thane finally turned, and his face had the look of a man who'd rehearsed this moment a thousand times in his head and found, now that it had arrived, that none of the rehearsals matched. "That I'd been paying a murderer for years to keep

Audrey's POVI didn't move toward her. I couldn't, not yet, though some part of me wanted to close the distance before my mind had finished deciding whether it believed what my eyes were showing me."Eleven years," I said. "You let me grieve you for eleven years.""I did." She didn't look away from it, didn't soften it into something more forgivable than it was. "There's no version of that sentence I can say that makes it smaller than it is. I let you grieve me because Warren made it clear what would happen to you if I didn't disappear cleanly enough to be believed.""He threatened you." Somewhere behind me, my father's voice, quiet, wrecked. "You never told me that.""I didn't tell you anything, Thane. That was rather the point of disappearing." A ghost of something almost like humor crossed her face, gone as quickly as it came. "You'd already shown me what you were willing to pay to keep a threat quiet. I didn't trust you to choose me over the arrangement you'd already built your wh

Reid's POVTen minutes is a long time to sit in a parked truck telling yourself a story about a broken thermostat.I'd borrowed the truck from one of the Calloway lots an hour ago, an unremarkable grey pickup with a magnetic sign on the door that actually did say CALLOWAY PROPERTY SERVICES, because Margaret was right about one thing. If you're going to lie, it helps to be able to prove it. I sat at the mouth of the gravel lot with the engine off and my phone face down on the seat beside me, watching Dorothy's sedan idle near unit 114 like it belonged there, because as far as thirty years of paperwork was concerned, it did.She hadn't gone in yet. She was waiting on me the way Margaret had planned it, and every second she waited was a second longer for someone to notice a car that hadn't moved.I made myself count to six hundred instead of watching the clock, because watching the clock is what makes a man look like he's got somewhere else to be.At six hundred I started the truck.The