Eleven Years All to the Wrong Man novel Chapter 152

Mr. Hayes held his daughter, gently stroking her long hair, too overwhelmed with emotion to speak.

Evan, who had followed them, remained at the pharmacy entrance, silently watching the father and daughter embrace and weep inside.

But the tender moment was short-lived, shattered by a sharp, piercing female voice.

“Well, well, well! Is that the Hayes family’s eldest daughter, back home at last?”

The speaker was Mrs. Jenkins, who lived two doors down from the pharmacy. She was one of the women who had been sitting at the street corner, drying her hair in the sun.

Having heard the commotion from the Hayeses' shop, she had hurried over without even grabbing a coat. Her hair was still damp, and a cheap, pink towel—the kind you get as a party favor at a banquet—was draped over her shoulders. She stood next to Evan, peering inside.

Hearing her voice, Robert came back to reality. He released his daughter, wiped his tears, and called out, “Yes, Mrs. Jenkins, my eldest is back!”

“Oh my goodness, Robert! Your daughter’s struck it rich, hasn’t she?”

Mrs. Jenkins stood beside Evan, her eyes scanning him up and down. Though she was speaking to Mr. Hayes, her gaze never left Evan.

“You look a little familiar to me,” she said.

Mrs. Jenkins’s puffy eyes crinkled as she forced a fawning smile at the impeccably dressed man before her.

She was the town’s most notorious busybody, a gossip who loved meddling in other people’s affairs.

When Emma and Evan’s relationship was discovered, she had wasted no time telling Mrs. Hayes how poor Evan was. She'd also bad-mouthed Mrs. Doyle, claiming she had intentionally let her grandson corrupt other people’s daughters.

A large part of Mrs. Hayes’s negative opinion of Evan came directly from Mrs. Jenkins’s mouth.

After Emma and Evan left Riverside Millford, Robert had told Emma in a phone call that Mrs. Jenkins had continued to spread vicious rumors, calling Emma promiscuous, saying she had no self-respect, and that she was an ungrateful brat for running off with a boy. The gossip had become so bad that Mrs. Hayes once got into a huge fight with her. Mrs. Jenkins had screamed insults at her, pointing a finger in her face, and the argument had left Mrs. Hayes so upset she was bedridden for two weeks.

Thinking of all this, Emma felt a natural and intense dislike for the woman standing before her.