The Ex-Change novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: After Dark

Jude's POV

Before I let Callie into the room, I checked it for cameras.

I looked behind the mirror, inside the lamp shades and under the lip of the canopy.

I unscrewed the smoke detector and found a smoke detector.

Then I put a towel over the little red standby light on the television.

I have been filmed since I was twenty, and I don't trust a red light.

She came in at eleven, with her coat over her arm and her phone held against her chest.

"I have him," she said. "Forty minutes of dinner, and a few seconds of Colton saying he never played that song for a soul."

"And the hum?"

"It's in there. Under his guitar, one beat early." She sat down on the end of the bed. "She knew the bridge, Jude."

"He wrote it in a hotel room in January."

"Yes."

"The card on Vanessa's dresser came from a hotel," I said, and stopped, because I could hear what I was saying.

Callie looked at me for a long moment.

Then she put the phone on the nightstand, face-down.

She was shaking.

It was a fine shake, in her hands and her shoulders.

It was what you get after holding a smile for three hours in front of the man who wasted four years of your life.

I knelt in front of her and took her shoes off, one at a time.

Her feet were freezing, so I put them in my lap and wrapped my shirt around them.

I straightened the cuff of her sleeve where it had folded under.

I reached up and pushed a piece of hair back from her eyebrow, the one with the scar through it.

Then I got up and fixed the pillow behind her.

I smoothed the corner of the sheet and pulled the blanket up over her knees.

My hands were doing all of it before I decided to.

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