All Chapters of My Wife and Father's Secret: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

"Jack, please!"Your father's too old for this. You'll kill him!"If you have to hate somebody, hate me. I shouldn't have left you out there. But he's still your father!"Linda started hitting herself in the face with both hands, hard enough that the sound carried.Blood came out of her nose and ran down over her mouth.More people crowded in through the doors.Two young fishermen shoved forward and grabbed a shoulder each, their faces tight with anger."Are you even a man, Jack? Look what you're doing to her. She saved your own father!"I looked at the woman on the floor, bloodying herself for an audience, and felt nothing at all.The face I'd once thought was the warmest thing in my life just made me sick now.My father shuffled up to me and picked a length of wood off the floor by the wall."I know you hate me, son."I wrecked my back hauling crates on that pier so you'd have a house and a wife. I've carried those injuries ever since. Now I'm old and I'm useless and I'm

My refusal to see reason finally used up whatever patience the old men in this harbor had left.Thomas called an open hearing outside the old Sutton boathouse and told everyone to be there.The yard in front of it was packed shoulder to shoulder.Ray Cole stood up on the loading platform with a sheet of paper in his hand."Jack Sutton. Do you admit what you've done?"I stood in the middle of the crowd and said nothing."Your wife saved your father's life. Instead of thanking her, you filed for divorce."You're walking that old man straight into his grave."Linda knelt down near the platform, wiping at her face."We've been married six years, Jack. Have you forgotten all of it?"Have you forgotten our first winter? You came in off the water burning up with fever, and I sat by the stove all night making you tea and broth. I stayed awake until my eyes were red."Have you forgotten last year, when that line tore your hand open? I warmed the ointment between my palms before I put

Frank's face went from white to gray. Sweat came up across his forehead."That was decades ago. How's an old man supposed to remember every detail?""Is that right?"I turned back several pages in the ledger."There's an old Sutton rhyme too. It tells you where to set your nets in each season, and it's always gone straight from father to son."I raised my voice so the whole yard could hear me."Spring wind east, the silver schools rise. Three-foot waves, cast where the sunrise lies."Summer wind south, the warm shoals run. Whitecaps turn, cast toward the sun."I closed the ledger."Go on. Give us fall and winter.""I... I..." He stammered and nothing came out."Did hauling crates make you forget how to fish, too?"Linda threw herself at me."Have you got no decency in you at all? He's an old man, his memory's going, and you're tormenting him on purpose. Aren't you afraid of what God does to people like you?"That got to a few of them."Jack, his memory really isn't what

Frank's lips were trembling."He's lying."The peddler ignored him."Bought a bottle of white hair dye off me too. Said he needed to look old so he could collect an inheritance out in a fishing village. He even asked whether the beard glue would hold if it got wet. I knew right then there was something wrong with him."The crowd came apart all over again.The whole thing had been a fraud from the first day.I couldn't hold myself back any longer. I got a fistful of that ugly beard and tore it off his face.The cheap adhesive took flecks of skin with it. He screamed, and a young, unfamiliar face came out from under the disguise.I grabbed his gray hair next. The roots underneath were black.He wasn't an old man at all. He was about my age.Linda sat where she'd fallen and didn't move. She knew it was finished.I walked over to the man everyone had been calling my father, and the hate in me was almost more than I could hold."How did my father die?"Victor flinched under the

She put every last piece of it on Victor.She was so afraid of being called the one who planned it that she laid out exactly how they'd schemed and exactly what each of them had done.She was still screaming that she was innocent when the door to the next holding area opened.Two deputies brought Victor out into the corridor.He'd heard every word.His face went dark and his bloodshot eyes locked onto her."You lying snake. Don't you dare put this on me."He threw himself against the bars."Who was it whispering in my ear every night that the old man was too sharp, that we'd never sleep easy until he was gone?"Who said do it in a storm, nobody questions a storm?"Who said it, Linda? A drunk old man drowning off his own boat, what could be more natural than that. Those were your words."She hadn't expected him to be standing there."You're lying. You wanted the Sutton property. You planned all of it."Victor laughed until it cracked."I wanted it? I didn't even know that