Back With Baby, Ex Regrets Deeply novel · Chapter 12 of 32

Chapter 12: The Program

Alistair was crouched by the stroller, unzipping the rain cover.

He looked up and saw what was in my hand.

He went still.

Not his usual stillness, the patient one.

The other kind, like a man who'd just heard ice crack under him.

"Faye."

"Take Teddy up," I said. "Please."

"Faye, let me..."

"Take him up and give him his bath and put him down. And then come back down here."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he lifted our son out of the stroller and carried him to the elevators without another word.

I sat on a sofa in the corner of the lobby in his wet coat and held my mother's funeral program in both hands.

The rain ran down the big windows onto Boylston.

People came and went with umbrellas.

A bellman asked if I was all right and I said yes.

I read the front of the program.

Her name, her dates, the hymn, the reading.

I hadn't looked at it in six years.

I'd thought it was gone.

I turned it over and looked at the drawing.

It wasn't good.

My hands had been shaking that night, and it was raining, and I'd drawn him by the light of a streetlamp.

But it was him.

The broken nose. The tired eyes. The collar up.

At the bottom, in very small letters, I'd written, "Thank you for the coat."

He came back down forty minutes later.

He'd changed his shirt.

His hair was still wet.

He sat down at the other end of the sofa, not touching me, and put his elbows on his knees.

"He's asleep," he said. "He made me read the bus book three times."

"You said we'd never met."

"I know."

"At the registry. In the hall at Heriot Row. Last week, at the window, with the soup. You said you'd never punched a wall."

"I haven't. It was a door. A fire door at Leith docks." He looked at his hands. "I lied about that too."

I waited.

He breathed out.

"My mother's buried in the same kirkyard as yours," he said. "Two rows down. I went that night because it would have been her birthday. I came out of the gate and there was a girl sitting on the wall in the rain with no coat. You'd been crying so long you'd stopped."

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