Chapter 14: Fine

I turned off the lamp before he stood up.

"Don't go out there," I whispered.

"If I don't, she comes to the door."

"Then you go out there as her husband and you come back as mine."

He stopped with one leg in his jeans.

"Say that again."

"Go," I said. "Before she rings the bell."

He pulled on his shirt and went down the stairs in the dark.

I knelt at the bedroom window and slid the sash up an inch.

Lydia's white car sat at the curb with the engine running. She rolled down her window as he crossed the lawn.

The streetlight caught her face.

She was smiling, the soft smile I had known since I was fifteen.

"There he is," she said.

"You scared me, Lyd."

"I wanted to surprise you. Is that so awful?"

"At midnight, outside another woman's house?"

"Her lodger. It's a house with a lodger." She laughed. "Don't be jealous of me, Rafe. I haven't done anything."

I put my forehead on the cold glass.

She reached out and took his hand through the window.

"Two weeks," she said. "That's all I'm asking."

"Two weeks of what?"

"You stand next to me, you smile, you let me have my moment."

She squeezed his fingers.

"Then everything is out in the open."

"And Casey?"

"Poor Casey has enough going on. Keep her out of the pictures. She's fragile right now."

"Fragile."

"You saw her at that microphone. She isn't well, baby."

The hand I couldn't see tightened on the sash.

"Two weeks," Rafe said. "Then I'm yours out loud."

"Say it again."

"I'm yours out loud."

She kissed his cheek through the car window. It was a quick kiss, the kind you give a man you own.

Then the white car pulled away, and Rafe stood in the street with his hand against his face.

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