The Ex-Change novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: The Ex Tribunal

We went to the fountain at midnight, and nobody kissed.

Jude threw a coin, I threw a coin, and Lowen screamed in both our ears for six minutes.

By the next afternoon she had stopped screaming and started scheduling.

"Ex Tribunal," she said, handing us each a call sheet. "Studio audience, three hundred. The host asks each ex to say what went wrong. Colton goes first. Sit. Smile. Please."

The studio had once been a theater.

They had painted the old stage floor white and put four leather chairs in a half circle under a rack of hot lights.

Colton took the center chair.

He crossed his ankle over his knee and looked down at me.

The host leaned toward him.

"Colton. In your own words. What went wrong in your marriage?"

"Callie is wonderful," Colton said, and the audience made the soft noise already. "But she's clingy. She cried at every premiere. She checked my phone, she counted my nights away, she wanted to know where I was every minute."

I had checked his phone twice, in four years.

Both times there had been a text from a woman named Van.

I'd been told Van was a florist.

"What else?" said the host.

"She was controlling about the thermostat." A little ripple of laughter. "And she never believed I was good at my job. I won my first award this year, and I thought, finally, she'll be proud. She watched my speech and left."

Jude's hand was on the arm of his own chair, a foot away from mine.

The red light was dark.

His fingers moved a quarter inch toward mine anyway, and stopped.

"Callie," said the host. "Your response."

I stood up.

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