He Swapped Himself Out at the Altar, So I Married the Honest Stranger novel · Chapter 22 of 24
Chapter 22: The Note
On the eighty-eighth morning someone tapped on the shop door twice.
I knew it before I opened my eyes, and my whole body went cold.
Cal was already up, and I heard his boots cross the shop floor below.
"Stay there," he said from the ladder.
"No," I said, and pulled on his flannel shirt.
I went down the stairs, and he stood aside at the bottom to let me through.
We had moved into Ridge Street the week before, into the room over the workshop, with his tools crowding my father's.
The tap came again, soft and patient, from the other side of the door.
I opened it.
The cold came in, and with it a smell I knew as well as my own name, cologne gone stale in a coat worn too many days.
"Hello, Junie," Hoyt said.
I stood in the doorway with Cal behind my shoulder, and I heard Hoyt's voice with nothing under it.
"You look well."
"What do you want?"
"I wanted to see you." He gave a short laugh. "I wanted to see if you'd know me."
"I know you."
"You always knew me by the tap."
He lifted his hand, and I heard his thumb come down on the doorframe, twice.
"That's not how I knew you," I said. "That's just how you knew me."
He was quiet.
Across the street a shop door opened, and the florist's bell jingled, and I heard the neighbors begin to stop on their stoops.
"Dad's cut me off," Hoyt said. "Cecelia filed on Tuesday. The board's selling my shares to pay the legal fees. I've got a room at my mother's cousin's, and the cousin doesn't like me."
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