Page 44 of The Hand that Frays

I’m allowing her loving side to shine through.

She’ll thank me one day.

“What the fuck?”Lyla whispers.

“Anne knows now, obviously,” I tell her as she flips the page.

“Well, yeah. She served fucking time for this man’s delusion.”

We keep reading, and the next page is more disturbing.

She said it was only the one time. Since Ada caught me with the cleaner last week, she’s been acting strange. She came into my home office the other night and solicited me for sex. She said she wouldn’t tell her mum what she saw me doing if I touched her and made her ache go away.

I did.

But now, she’s holding it over my head like an anvil she’s waiting to drop on me at any moment.

I can’t have Anne knowing what I’ve been doing. She loves the kids too much.

She’d be devastated.

She wouldn’t understand.

She’d have me arrested.

The more I do for Ada, the more I lick her virgin pussy, the more I want to sink my cock in her.

I’m becoming as deluded as she is.

More so than I was before.

I have to get her help.

I have to get her out of this house.

“So,he pushed Anne to commit her?” I ask Lyla.

“Seems like it. Anne’s signature was required for the intake forms.”

“So, Carl kept his portion of the fucked-up situation going on with Ada to himself and outed her as a peeping Tom, then.”

“Probably. Kept himself out of it.”

I nod toward the file, and Lyla turns to the last entry.

They know.

The world knows that I’ve been poisoning the kids. Cecily told on me, and there’s no going back now.

By the grace of God, they think Anne is the one doing it. She doesn’t realize it’s me. She won’t let herself believe it.

She thinks it’s Ada.

Even so, she got the little psycho out of the institution, so Ada’s instability doesn’t look bad on us while we’re under investigation.

Anne convinces herself that because there’s insufficient evidence to prove the children have been poisoned, this would all go away.

I don’t think she realizes how long I’ve been at this.

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