The Last Words of Madeleine Anderson by Helen Kitson

Author:Helen Kitson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: modern, contemporary, fiction
Publisher: Louise Walters Books
Published: 2019-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you…

I’d never felt any compulsion to confess the truth. Not to my parents, not to Mr Latham, not to Madeleine’s parents. And how to explain what I’d done? Would anyone believe that Madeleine had simply handed over her novel with the intention of me publishing it under my name? It wasn’t credible. I would be labelled a thief, a fraud, a fake. My actions, however one tried to spin them, couldn’t look anything other than shabby. A true friend would have wanted to see Madeleine’s name glowing on the front cover of her book – a lasting epitaph.

I owed Simon nothing – no more, certainly, than I owed to Madeleine’s parents, those good, damaged people from whom I’d long been estranged. Occasionally I’d tormented myself imagining their reactions if I were fool enough to blurt out the truth. Horror. Disgust. Pity? An insistence that I make a public declaration, a shifting of the crown from my head to Madeleine’s?

And how the literary press would have clamoured to dip their bread in such a tasty sauce had I been tempted to tell. How they would have rolled up their sleeves, flexed their fingers and tapped out their thousands of jabbing words. What a story!

What was the point? She was dead. Brutal but inescapable fact. Fame couldn’t touch her.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.