He Chose Her. I Chose Divorce novel · Chapter 19 of 24
Chapter 19: The Night Before
The night before the listing, Ben stood at the hotel window with his back to me.
He had been there for most of an hour.
Russell's three typed pages lay folded on the nightstand, and I had read their first line until it stopped being words.
Snow was coming down over the river, and the Tamblyn tower stood lit from top to bottom three blocks away.
"Say it," I said from the bed.
"Say what?"
"The thing you've been practicing at that glass."
He turned around.
He wore the one decent shirt he owned, open at the collar, and he looked like a man about to lift something heavy.
"Tomorrow your name goes up on a screen," he said. "You walk out of that building with a piece of everything on this skyline."
"Probably."
"And I have a boatyard with nine men, a leaking roof and a bank note that isn't mine yet."
"Ben."
"I'm not asking you to stay. I'm telling you what's true. A woman with all this goes back to it, Maggie. It's not a crime. It's weather."
I got up and crossed the carpet in my bare feet.
"You think I'll go back."
"I think you'll want to."
"Do you know what I want?"
"No."
"I want a drafting table with a crack down the middle," I said. "I want a stove that smokes. I want your crew yelling about pasties, and a boat on the stocks that I'm the only one who understands."
"That's a small life."
"It's a whole one. It's the first one I picked."
His eyes searched my face.
"I never picked anything in my life," I said. "Then you put forty-three dollars on a hardware store counter for a stranger."
"That's not picking."
"It was for me."
He didn't speak.
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