My Fiancé Chose His Ex, So I Chose Myself novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Dock

Hugh saw my face and turned to the window.

He set his mug down very carefully.

"I'll go," he said.

"No." I was already pulling his canvas coat off the hook by the door. "She came here for me. She can have me."

"Edie, you're in a sweater."

"Your sweater," I said. "That's the whole point of her video."

I put the coat on over it.

I pushed my bare feet into his rubber boots, three sizes too big, and went out the kitchen door.

The grass was soaked and freezing.

The boots slapped against my heels all the way down the lawn.

Shayla watched me come with her phone held against her chest.

The tide was high, slapping under the dock boards.

Out past her shoulder, a gray heron lifted off a piling and flapped away low over the water.

I stopped six feet from her.

"You're trespassing," I said.

"I used to come out here all the time." She looked past me at the house. "He'd make me coffee in that ugly little pot. I hated that pot."

"It makes good coffee."

"I'm sure it does, honey. You look like you've had a lot of it." Her eyes went down to the sweater hanging out under the coat, to my bare legs and his boots. "Wow. One night. You really don't waste time, do you?"

"You waited a lot less than a night."

Her smile thinned.

She held up her phone and turned the screen so I could see it.

It was me in the kitchen window, framed in the glass, in Hugh's gray sweater with my hair down, laughing at something.

I didn't even remember laughing.

"Pregnant fiancée dumped for the seamstress," she said. "That's the caption. 'Here she is the morning after, in his clothes, while I'm sick in the mornings with his baby.' The News Tribune will love it."

"Post it."

She blinked.

"I'm a grown woman in a sweater," I said. "You threw a mimosa at a dead woman's wedding dress in front of a hundred and fifty brides. Post whatever you want, Shayla. People can count."

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