Page 51 of Daddy’s Fortitude

A collective gasp went up around the room.

“He did not sleep with half the skanks in this town,” Kelly-Anne exclaimed. “He only slept with me.”

She couldn’t help but laugh. The other woman had to be delusional to think that Charlie had been faithful to her.

“If he was cheating on Aimee with you,” Honey yelled out, “then what makes you think he wasn’t sleeping with someone else behind your back?”

“Because Charlie wouldn’t do that to me,” Kelly-Anne stated. “He loved me. He’s always loved me. We were meant to be together since we were teenagers. Everyone knows that. She’s the one that got in between us.” She pointed at Aimee.

“I got in between you? I didn’t even know you existed,” she said to Kelly-Anne. “Charlie never told me about you.”

Kelly-Anne gasped, and then tears ran down her cheeks. Aimee might have felt bad for what she’d said if Kelly-Anne hadn’t ambushed her at Charlie’s funeral with all of this. She was the one who had brought it up here, so she had to pay the price for that. She couldn’t have it both ways. She couldn’t expect to go after Aimee and not have her defend herself.

“How do I know you weren’t the only one who was sleeping with Charlie?” she said. “Because I found a bra in his car several sizes smaller than yours.” Kelly-Anne had had a breast enlargement a couple of years back, and she was at least an E cup now. The bra that she’d found was a B cup.

“What?” Kelly Anne gasped. She glanced around in horror. “Who else was Charlie involved with?”

No one moved for a moment. She guessed they didn’t want to go up against the Queen Bee of Greasy Knob.

Then, to her surprise, a woman at the back stood up. “Charlie was my lover. I didn’t know about anyone else, though.”

Then another woman stood, and then another, until there were about half a dozen women standing there claiming to have had sex with Charlie.

Aimee swallowed heavily. She was going to vomit. She’d known he was cheating on her, but she hadn’t realized it was with this many people. And these were only the women at his funeral.

When she looked closely at a couple of them, she realized that she didn’t recognize them. Maybe they came from other towns.

“No, no, this isn’t true.” Kelly-Anne turned to her, pointing at her with a shaky finger. “You’re just doing this to get back at me because Charlie wanted me and not you. You set this up.”

“How did she set it up, Kelly-Anne, when she didn’t know that you were going to do this to her?” Kirsten pointed out as she stood.

“And how would I have gotten all these women, some of whom I don’t even know, to stand up and say that they were sleeping with Charlie?” Aimee asked.

Kelly-Anne’s face started to go bright red. “You did this. You’ve always been jealous of me. Of the fact that Charlie loved me more than you.”

“Then why didn’t he marry you?” Kirsten said, crossing her arms over her chest. “If he loved you so much, why didn’t he leave Aimee and marry you? My guess is that he liked the sneaking around, that it gave him a rush.”

“Charlie was sick of your snotty, stuck-up ways, Aimee. He needed a real woman. A proper woman.”

“Seems like he liked bitches,” Honey said.

“Who the fuck are you?” Kelly-Anne snarled.

“I’m friends with Aimee,” Honey said.

It actually caused a rush of warmth to fill her to hear Honey call her friend, even though they had known each other less than an hour.

She wished they were actually friends. She could do with someone like Honey on her side.

“Ladies, I’m really not sure that this is the place to talk like this—” the celebrant started to say.

“He told me that I was the only one,” Mary McCrombie said from three rows back. She had tears running down her face. “He told me that he was going to leave Aimee to be with me.”

“You’re lying, Mary McCrombie,” Kelly-Anne said. “You tried to get between us in high school, and you’re trying to get between us now.”

Well, one could argue that no one could get between them since Charlie was actually dead, but she didn’t say that.

She just watched in amazement as Kelly-Anne strode over to where Mary was standing by the aisle and slapped her hard.