The Lies Behind Her Marriage novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: The Loading Dock
The Toledo dock at noon smelled like diesel, rain, and sheet cake.
Somebody had strung white lights along the awning.
Somebody else had set out folding chairs in rows facing the loading platform, two hundred of them, and nearly all were full.
The drivers had come straight from the courthouse in their clean jackets.
Findlay and Fremont had come too, in the same buses, with their lunches.
I stood at the top of the platform steps with my father's old navy blazer on over a cream dress.
My knees felt like water.
My hands did not.
On the platform behind me stood two things I had not asked for.
The first was my father's chair from the boardroom, the leather one with the brass nameplate on the arm.
DRAY.
It had been carried down three flights by four drivers who refused to say who had given the order.
The second was the plaque from the lobby, taken off its wall and bolted to a steel post right beside the chair.
KEANE HAULAGE, EST. 1974.
THEY DROVE THESE ROADS FIRST.
"Bridget," I said.
"I know nothing," Bridget said.
She stood at my elbow in the green velvet jumpsuit, holding a bouquet of flowers from a gas station.
"Whose idea was the plaque?"
"The drivers voted," she said.
"Ninety-one percent. We know how to count."
Nolan stood at the foot of the steps.
He had walked from the courthouse in his suit, because he said he wanted to arrive on his own feet.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of The Lies Behind Her Marriage are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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