She Jumped Into His Pool and Blamed Me, So I Left Him novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Rule Two

Phoebe drove back to Astoria at six, and Lila went to bed early, and the house got dark.

I didn't sleep.

Bennett's email sat on my phone with forty replies under it, and the clinic director's name was the first.

Congratulations, the director had written, and then, Let's talk Monday.

I put the phone face down on the sheet and listened to the water.

Under the floor, a plane was moving across wood.

I pulled on the gray sweatshirt and went down the back stairs into the boat bay.

One bulb hung over the workbench, and Mitchell stood under it with his sleeves pushed up and a hand plane in his fist.

A long hull lay upside down on the sawhorses, only ribs and a keel, pale and new.

"You're building it," I said.

"I'm trying to."

"It's beautiful."

He stopped planing.

"It's rule two," he said. "After dark. Not a word about him."

"I wasn't going to say a word about him."

"You were thinking about him."

"His email's got forty replies."

"That's a word."

"It's a fact," I said. "Rule two is for you, too."

He put the plane down and wiped his palms on his jeans.

"It was supposed to be for me," he said. "I'm breaking it."

I waited.

"In April you told him I draw hulls."

"I did what?"

"At your clinic's spring dinner. He asked what his brother does out on that dock all day, and you told him I draw boats at night and keep the drawings in a tube under the stairs." His voice was very even. "I'd told nobody. I was going to buy the old yard on the Shinnecock side with my own money and leave."

"Mitchell."

"He told our mother that week. She bought the yard out from under me before I made an offer."

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