Chapter 21: Her Father's Bench

Cassandra's POV

I turned to the last page of the divorce papers.

His signature sat at the bottom in one hard black stroke.

I had watched him sign it in bay four.

Under it, in blue ink, in a smaller and shakier hand, he had written a line.

I read it with my thumb on the page.

Not filed. Not ever, unless you ask. Ask me what I'm for.

I read it a second time.

Then I looked across the table.

Gavin sat with his hands flat on the wood, waiting, as he had waited in the chapel and on my floor.

"You wrote this the night I handed you the pen," I said.

"In the car outside the hospital."

"You didn't even know yet."

"I knew I wasn't going to file," Gavin said. "I didn't know why.

"I wrote it down so I'd remember I had decided."

I folded the papers back along their creases.

"I'm not answering today," I said.

He nodded.

"Not because the answer is no.

"I have never answered a question like that from a room of my own, and I want to try it."

He understood me faster than anyone ever had.

"Then let's find you a roof," he said.

"I'll find it."

"Cassandra."

"I'll find it, Gavin. You can carry boxes."

A smile broke across his whole face.

It was the first one I had seen there in years that was not tired.

The lawyers did the rest.

Simon's firm froze the account in Willa's maiden name on Monday.

By the end of the week the six hundred and twelve thousand dollars sat in an account with only my name on it.

I stood in the bank and stared at the number until the teller asked if I was well.

I used a small part of it on the back room of the frame shop.

The owner was a woman in her seventies who had liked my work since the week I moved in.

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