Chapter 10: Signing Day

I turned around.

Keith was standing at the edge of the crowd by the cider stand, in his good coat, with his hands in his pockets.

I hadn't known he was there.

From the look on his face, he hadn't planned on being seen.

I walked straight to him.

Mitch came with me, and so did half the crowd, because nobody was going back to shopping now.

"Whose idea was the daughter, Keith?"

"Not mine. Bec, I swear to God. I believed her."

"Show me."

"Show you what?"

"Your texts with her. All of them. Right here."

"Bec, there's people."

"There were people when you sent her our savings. There were people every time I carried your boxes up her stairs. Show me."

He looked at Mitch.

Mitch looked back at him and said nothing, which for Mitch was a speech.

Keith took out his phone and opened the thread and handed it to me.

I scrolled to the top.

It went back fourteen months, to the week she became his default address.

In January, Shana had written to him.

"I've never told anyone this. I have a little girl. Her dad left when she was a baby. She's sick, Keith."

He hadn't invented it.

He'd swallowed it whole.

I kept scrolling.

Her hearts. His hearts. Pictures of the robe, the boots, the perfume, all with "you spoil me" underneath.

Then November nineteenth.

"The hospital wants a deposit by Friday or they'll bump her surgery," Shana had written. "I'm so scared."

"How much?" Keith had written.

"I couldn't ask you that."

"How much, Shay?"

"Thirty-eight."

And then Keith, the next morning.

"Done. Don't you dare pay it back. Becca will never notice, she doesn't look at that account."

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