My Husband Timed Our Marriage, So I Ran Out the Clock novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Seven-Forty Slot

Stewart books thirty minutes on her moving morning and leaves mid-sentence when Delaney calls; the mover says he has all day.

At six forty the next morning, a calendar invite from my husband landed on my phone.

"Hannah. 7:40 to 8:10. Apartment."

He had booked thirty minutes with me, and he had put a location on it.

I was standing in the doorway of our Tribeca bedroom with two flattened boxes under my arm.

Joy stood behind me, still in her dental scrubs, drinking coffee out of a thermos.

"Is that a meeting request?" she said. "From your husband? To your own apartment?"

"Yes."

"I'm going to throw up, and then I'm going to take the good towels."

The mover came up the stairs at seven.

He was a big man in a gray t-shirt, with brown hair going gray at the sides and a pale scar across his left thumb.

"Drew Tilden," he said. "Joy said two suitcases and some boxes."

"Some boxes," I said. "It's six years of books."

He looked at the shelves and nodded.

"Then it's a morning job," he said.

He did not say it like a problem.

He taped a box, picked up the first stack of paperbacks, and started packing without asking where anything went.

I watched him wrap my mother's quilt in two layers of paper so it would not touch the floor.

At 7:39 the door opened.

Stewart stood in the hallway in a charcoal suit, with his phone in his hand and his thumb already on the screen.

He did not say good morning.

"I have thirty minutes," he said. "I suggest we use them."

"I suggest you take your keys back."

I held them out.

He did not take them.

"Hannah, last night was an overreaction, and I let it go because you were upset." He glanced at Drew and the half-wrapped shelves. "That is three minutes I have already spent on the doorway."

"That's a lot of doorway," Joy said.

"Joy, I'd like to talk to my wife."

"Then talk," Joy said. "She's right here."

Stewart ignored her.

"Come back with me today," he said to me. "I'll cancel Thursday and we'll have dinner. The whole forty minutes."

I looked at him and tried to find the woman who would have said yes to that.

She was not in the room.

"You'd cancel Thursday for me?" I said.

"I'd move it."

"What's Thursday?"

"A call." His eyes flicked to the phone. "Delaney is handling the details, she always does."

"Then let Delaney take me to dinner," I said.

His jaw tightened.

"Hannah, you are making a scene in front of a stranger."

"I'm not a stranger," Drew said from the shelves. "I'm the guy with the tape."

Joy snorted into her thermos.

I started saying the thing I had practiced in the shower at Joy's apartment.

"Stewart, I was not asking for more minutes last night. I was telling you I don't want them. I don't want one more, not even the..."

His phone rang.

It rang in the flat low tone I had heard at every dinner for six years.

The screen said "Delaney."

He answered before the second ring.

"Yes. No, I'm at the apartment." He turned half away from me. "Your eight-fifteen moved up? Fine. I'll be there in twenty."

I stood there with my sentence in my mouth.

He lowered the phone and looked at his watch.

"I have to go," he said. "I'll call you tonight, and I'll block out the time."

"Stewart."

"We'll continue this."

He did not say goodbye.

The door closed behind him at 7:52.

Joy stared at the closed door for a long moment.

"He gave you thirteen minutes," she said. "Out of thirty. And he spent three of them on the doorway."

"I know."

"He took a call in the middle of your sentence."

"I know, Joy."

"I'm going to key his car."

"You're going to finish your coffee."

She did.

I stood in the middle of the living room with the keys still in my hand.

Behind me the tape gun squealed and a book hit the bottom of a box.

My hands were shaking again, so I put the keys on the counter and picked up a roll of tape.

Drew looked over from the shelves.

He did not ask me what had happened, and he did not tell me it would be fine.

He handed me the bubble wrap and moved a stack of books closer so I could reach them.

We packed in silence for an hour.

It was the first quiet hour I had spent in that apartment in years that did not feel like waiting.

At a quarter past ten, Drew set the last box on the dolly and wheeled it to the door.

"That's the truck," he said. "Take your time, I've got all day."

I stood in the doorway of the apartment where I had lived for six years.

Nobody had said that to me once.

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