I cringed when I tried to imagine what Aunt Mattie would have said if things hadn’t worked out the way they did, and I had to tell folks that I’d put Odell out because of Betty Jean. Aunt Mattie had been insinuating all along that I wouldn’t be able to hold on to him. Now I wouldn’t have to tell anybody about him and Betty Jean. But I was concerned about Yvonne and Milton blabbing that news to other people. I didn’t know what I could do to stop them. When the time came, I’d get down on my knees and beg them to keep what they knew to themselves. I’d pay them to keep quiet if I had to. They were hoodlums, but they had cared enough about me that they couldn’t continue to sit back and let Odell get away with his antics. He was the real villain in this horror story, not Yvonne and Milton. They were ignorant, greedy, and uncouth, but at the end of the day, they’d had more compassion for me than the man I’d put on a pedestal.

After my bath, I went back to the living room, clicked on the light, and checked on Odell. There was so much more blood on the floor around him, it looked like he was lying on a red blanket. His eyes were closed, and he was still breathing. But it was so slow and shallow, I knew it was just a matter of minutes before he took his last breath.

I made sure the front door was locked before I turned off the lamp. And then I went to bed.

Before I’d left to go have “supper” with Yvonne and Milton, I had started reading Wuthering Heights for the second time. The first time I’d read it, I’d felt so sorry for Heathcliff and Catherine. I had enjoyed how happy they had been in the first half of the book, and I had compared their relationship and devotion to each other to Odell and me. But by the second half of the story, Heathcliff had gotten bitter and vengeful because of all the bad things he’d endured. I was disappointed that Emily Brontë had done a turnaround on such a beautiful love story. Being a Christian, I had wanted Heathcliff to forgive the people who had hurt him. Well, I was still a Christian, but in less than twenty-four hours I had been betrayed and hurt beyond belief. I could never forgive Odell. The fact that Yvonne and Milton had known about his cheating and thieving ways and kept it from me, made me almost as mad at them.

* * *