Reborn to Love Mr. Right novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: Bedside Signing

Wyatt was out my front door before I'd lowered the phone.

I heard him take the stairs three at a time.

By the time I got to the window, he was standing in the middle of Chapel Street under the streetlight, turning in a slow circle.

Nobody.

A dog barking two houses down.

At the corner, a pair of taillights turning onto Elm, too far away to be any color at all.

He came back up white around the mouth and called campus police from my kitchen.

Two officers came, took a photo of my phone, and looked at the sidewalk under my window with a flashlight.

One of them found a fresh cigarette butt.

Brock smoked when he drank and swore he didn't.

Wyatt slept in the armchair facing my front door with every light in the apartment off.

He didn't sleep, actually.

Every time I woke, he was awake.

On Saturday afternoon, the Boston CEO signed the merger at my father's kitchen table.

My father had been home from the hospital for two weeks and was under orders not to climb stairs, lift anything, or get excited.

He was failing at the last one.

"Pen," he said, holding his out across the table like a sword. "My wife's. She signed the first lease with it."

The big bald man took it carefully.

He signed in three places, under the kitchen light, next to the blue bowl full of lemons.

Then he sat back and smoothed his mustache.

"Thirty-one hotels," he said. "And one very frightening daughter."

"She gets that from her mother," my father said.

"I'd assumed so. You're far too pleasant."

My father laughed so hard he had to put his hand on his chest, and I said "Dad," and he waved me off, grinning.

When the CEO had gone, I made tea and sat down where he'd been.

Wyatt was leaning in the kitchen doorway in a gray sweater, arms crossed.

He knew what I was about to say.

He'd known since Greenwich.

"Dad," I said. "Somebody took a picture of me through my kitchen window on Monday night."

My father's face went very still.

I gave him the rest straight, and I watched him reach for his phone halfway through.

By the time I finished, he'd called his head of security and told him to drive up to Bellmont tonight.

"Then nobody gets into that lot unwatched," my father said, and put the phone down beside the blue bowl.

"I'm walking tomorrow," I said. "In front of six thousand people. Campus police have the faculty lot. They'll be in it from eleven."

"And if he tries something, he does it in front of them."

My father looked at me for a long time over his reading glasses.

"You sound like you've done this before," he said.

I didn't answer.

Wyatt pushed off the doorframe and walked out of the kitchen.

He was in my apartment when I got back to Chapel Street an hour later, standing at the window where the photo had been taken.

"You could stay home," he said without turning around. "You could be in Greenwich. You could be on a plane."

"And he'd still be out there on Monday. And Tuesday. And next year."

"Then I'll deal with Monday."

"You can't stand in front of me for the rest of my life, Wyatt."

He turned around.

"Watch me."

"I won't let you."

"You don't get to let me," he said, and his voice cracked straight down the middle.

"I've watched you die, Annabel. I've done it. I know what it sounds like when your breathing stops."

"And you want me to stand on a quad tomorrow and watch you walk toward that lot on purpose?"

"I'm not walking toward it alone."

"You walked toward it alone last time!"

"Last time I didn't know!" I shouted back.

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