The Love We Missed novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Truck

I read them until one-thirty.

I read the cantaloupes, and the one about the forklift, and the one about a raccoon in the produce cage.

I read the one I used to know by heart.

"Someday you're getting a house with a porch swing, and you're never staying up till two again."

Then I put on my coat over my pajamas and went downstairs and knocked on my sister's door.

Tricia opened it with one eye.

"Somebody dead?"

"Watch Nellie. She's asleep. I'll be back."

"It's one-thirty."

"I know what time it is, Trish."

She looked at my face and stopped asking.

She just took her keys off the hook and went up the stairs past me in her socks.

Bryant Street was black and wet.

The bistro was dark in front, but there was a light in the kitchen, the way I knew there would be.

I went around through the alley and tried the back door.

It was unlocked.

Ciaran was at the steel counter in a T-shirt with a mountain of onions in front of him.

He wasn't cutting them.

He was just standing there with the knife flat on the board, looking at nothing.

He heard the door and turned around.

He saw my face, and then the phone in my hand, and he put the knife down very carefully.

"You found it," he said.

"Tell me."

He didn't ask what I meant.

The kitchen clock said two exactly.

"The truck job paid fourteen an hour," he said. "Six p.m. to two. We got a break at ten. Twenty minutes."

"I know. I waited up for it."

"Patrick slept through every one. In the truck cab, with his boots on the dash." He swallowed. "The first week, your text came in while he was snoring. He threw me the phone. He said, keep her happy, I'm sleeping."

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