My Husband Lent Me to His Best Friend for the Night, and the Man He Chose Was the One I Hated Most novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: Her Terms
Eleni did not come up.
She stood on the pavement for the length of one hymn from the church three streets away.
Then she got back into the Mercedes and it pulled away.
I had understood what it meant.
She had found where I was, and she wanted me to know that she could.
That night I walked to Halsted Street alone.
The street was dry and cold, with the bakery window lit at the corner and the smell of bread in the air from the back vents.
Above the bakery was a narrow door with a bell.
I had never been inside.
I had never been told it was there, and I had always known.
I pressed the bell.
The door opened at once.
He stood at the top of a steep stair in a gray work shirt with the sleeves rolled, and his bare feet on the bare boards, and he looked down at me the way a man looks at weather that has finally come.
"You said no," he said.
"I did," I said.
"I'm here to say something else."
"Come up."
The flat was one long room under a sloped roof.
A bed against the far wall with a gray blanket, a table with one chair, a gas stove, a shelf with eleven books.
The only picture on any wall was a black-and-white photograph of a boy and a girl on a Halsted Street stoop, squinting in the sun.
I looked at it.
"Who's that?" I asked.
"Stavros and his sister," he said.
"She died when I was nineteen.
"I had no one.
"His father let me eat at their table for a year."
"You don't eat at it now," I said.
"I haven't since the old man died," he said.
I stood in the middle of the floor with my coat on.
I was shaking, not from the cold.
"I'm not saying yes to the marriage," I said.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Husband Lent Me to His Best Friend for the Night, and the Man He Chose Was the One I Hated Most are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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