Ruined By My Stepbrother novel · Chapter 27 of 32

Chapter 27: Open Window

"Under your own name," I said.

He nodded, with the phone still against his chest.

"Restaurants?"

"Restaurants. Anywhere I want. More money than Cold Plate. My face on it."

My fry cook had stopped chopping shallots.

My grill cook was pretending to read the ticket rail.

"What do you want to do?" I said.

"I don't know yet." He looked at me. "And I'm telling you I don't know, the same hour."

"Then tell her you need a week."

He put the phone back to his ear.

"I need a week," he said.

On Thursday he drove to Philadelphia to meet her in person.

He texted me from the Expressway, from the magazine's lobby and from the parking garage after.

"She bought me lunch. I had the soup. I didn't review it."

"Was it from a can?"

"Yes."

He stayed through the weekend to deal with his condo, the one he'd barely slept in all summer.

I did a hundred and eight covers on Saturday without him and didn't once look at the door.

Frankie looked at it for me.

After Labor Day, Low Tide goes dark on Mondays until spring.

So on Monday the fourteenth, for the first time since May, I had a night off.

Barrett drove back down at four.

At seven he knocked at my door in a blue button-down with the sleeves rolled.

I came out in a black dress I'd bought for a wedding I didn't go to.

"Where are we going?" he said.

"Across the street."

He stared at me.

"You want to eat at Brine."

"I want to sit on that roof," I said. "Once. Where he stood."

Nobody had seen Dane since he walked out the side of his tent.

The town said he was in Philadelphia, with lawyers of his own.

Brine was still open, for now.

A hundred and twenty seats, and barely a dozen people in them on a Monday in September.

The hostess took us up to the roof without a word.

She recognized us.

Everybody recognized us now.

The roof was empty.

String lights, white umbrellas folded, forty stools at a long bar and nobody on any of them.

The single bulb in its cage still hung at the end of the rail.

I walked straight to it and looked across Jackson Street.

There was my window.

My father's brown chair.

My bed under it.

From up here, it was so close I could see the spoon on my nightstand.

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