Five Years of Marriage to Mr. Bradford novel · Chapter 18 of 24
Chapter 18: I'm Using You
I crossed the road at midnight with the phone in my hand and did not knock.
The green door was unlocked.
Leonard was sitting on the bare floor of his flat with his back against the bed and a glass of water he had not touched.
He got up fast.
"Say it," I said. "In order. All of it, tonight."
"The thirty days..."
"Are finished. I'm the one who wrote them."
He looked at the phone and then at me, and he sat down again, slowly.
"It was my birthday," he said. "Dinner at the club, my mother's table. Imogen sat beside me. I'd had too much, and she had too much, and we left at midnight."
I stayed standing.
"She asked for the keys. I gave them to her. I was sick of my own hands."
"She drove."
"She always did, when I'd been drinking. It was never a question." His voice was low and level. "On Route 9 there was a boy walking on the shoulder with a case on his back. I saw him a second before she did."
"Don't," I said, but I did not mean it.
"She didn't brake. The car clipped him. I felt it in my teeth."
"Was he..."
"He was alive." Leonard said it to the floor. "I made her stop. I got out and went to him, and he was breathing, and he said, 'Fiddle.'"
The room tilted.
I sat down on the edge of the bed with my hand over my mouth.
"Imogen wouldn't call anyone. She said her hands, her career. She said we'd go to prison. She said it fast, and over and over, and I was kneeling in the road and I believed her for a minute."
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