Chapter 14: Laurel's POV: The Studio

Laurel's POV

Nolan got out of the car before I did.

He crossed Maple Street and stopped at Trenton's window with his hands in his pockets.

I could not hear them, but I watched my husband's back.

It was a thin back, and a straight one.

Trenton laughed at something, patted the door twice, and pulled away from the curb with a wave.

Nolan stood in the road until the taillights turned the corner.

Then he came back and took the paper bag from my hands, and carried it up the stairs for me.

My studio was one room over a laundromat.

It had a mattress on the floor, a hot plate, a card table, and a scrub top hanging from a nail.

I had lived in it for two years, because everything else had gone to the man at the diner lot.

I had stood in that lot sixty times with a white envelope in my coat.

I had sold my grandfather's farm, acre by acre, to a developer who called it an opportunity.

Nolan stood in the middle of the floor and turned around once.

He looked at the mattress.

He looked at the nail.

"This is what it cost," he said.

"It's a room."

"Laurel."

"You don't get to be sorry in here," I said. "I won't have it."

He stared at me.

I was tired of waiting for the end of the sentence.

I had spent five years knowing exactly what he would do in the end.

On Friday he would sit at his father's table with his father's hand on his shoulder.

He would pick up the pen.

He had picked his family over me the night I warned him, and people do not change in nine days.

So I stepped up close and took hold of his shirt.

"Here is the rule," I said. "No apologies in this bed. When it's over, you can leave."

His jaw moved.

"And if I don't want to leave?"

"Then you're a fool," I said, "and I'll still say the rule."

He kissed me.

It was nothing like the one in the jail.

It was slow for one second, and then it wasn't.

His hand came up into my short hair, and his mouth opened mine, and I made a noise I had not made since I was twenty-seven.

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