Back With Baby, Ex Regrets Deeply novel · Chapter 11 of 32

Chapter 11: Her Chair

"Forty million dollars," I said. "I know what he paid. I was there."

Laurel laughed at me in the mirror.

It was a wet, ugly laugh, but it was a laugh.

"Sure you were," she said.

She picked up her pink coat off the hook and walked out past me, and her shoulder knocked mine on the way.

I stood in the coat room with Teddy's tiny coat in my hands.

I told myself she was a liar who'd just been caught lying in front of forty people, and liars say things on the way out the door.

I told myself that all the way back to the hotel.

I didn't tell Alistair.

The next day it rained on and off, the soft gray Boston kind that never decides.

At noon we took Teddy down to the hotel bar for lunch, because the bar had a fireplace and a bowl of green olives he liked to look at but not eat.

Alistair sat at the end of the long bar with his phone and a coffee.

I sat beside him with Teddy on my knee.

"Bus," Teddy said to the bartender.

"Hey, buddy. Nice bus."

"Big bus."

"Real big."

Teddy approved of him.

Halfway through his grilled cheese Teddy announced a diaper situation to the entire room.

I took him to the restroom off the lobby.

It took a while.

Teddy had opinions about the changing table and expressed them.

When I came back across the lobby with him on my hip, I stopped by the big potted palm at the bar entrance.

Somebody was in my seat.

Platinum hair. Pale pink.

Laurel was perched on my stool at the end of the bar, turned toward my husband with her knees almost touching his, her chin on her hand.

She'd fixed her face.

She looked very, very good.

The bar was half full.

A table of businessmen by the window had stopped talking to watch.

"I just think we got off on the wrong foot," she was saying, low and warm. "Faye's always been so... intense. You must know that by now. Three years. That has to be exhausting."

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