Chapter 12: The Drawer

We sat at the kitchen table.

The Thai menu was still there with my crossed-out rules. I laid the three pages on top of it.

Nobody spoke.

"Start with the key," I said.

Declan put both hands flat on the wood. He did that when he was about to say something hard.

"A week before your last launch, I went into your study to find a stapler," he said. "The drawer was locked. It's always locked."

He looked at his hands.

"And I got curious."

"You copied the key."

"I took it off your ring while you were in the shower.

"I had it copied at the hardware store in town. I put it back before you were out."

"And you read it."

"All of it. I read it in one night, in the barn. Two hundred and forty pages."

"What did you think?"

He looked at me then.

"I thought you'd written the saddest love story I ever read," he said.

"And I thought I was the man in it who gets the salt."

My throat closed.

Roz pressed her fist against her mouth.

"Then what?" I said.

"Then I didn't know what to do. I couldn't ask you. It was locked for a reason."

His voice shook.

"So I took three pages to Roz. On your launch night, after the toast. I didn't know who else to show."

"You showed my best friend my private pages."

"I showed her because they were about her."

"That wasn't yours to decide."

"No," said Declan. "It wasn't."

I turned to Roz.

She had gone silent, her eyes very bright, her hands knotted in her lap.

"Roz," I said. "Your turn."

"I read them in his truck outside the hospital, at six in the morning."

She took a breath.

"I read them twice. Then I got out and was sick in the parking lot."

"Why?"

"Because I knew it was true. I had wanted you since I was nineteen."

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