The Night He Chose Her Over Me novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Red Dress

I went back to the yard on Friday night, after the last bake, and I knocked on the loft door.

He opened it in his shirtsleeves, with his hand on the frame and his face ready for anything.

"You said not unless I'm with you," he said. "I haven't been on the bridge."

"I know. I'm not here about the bridge."

I walked past him into the loft and stood by the stove with my coat on.

"I'm going to the gala," I said.

"I figured."

"I'm going in the red dress."

His mouth moved.

"The one from the anniversary?"

"It's the only dress I own that I bought for myself."

"Cora, he'll use me. He'll stand up in that room and say my name and the word driver, and he'll look at you while he does it."

"Let him."

"He'll say I lied to you for a month."

"You did lie to me for a month."

He took that without a flinch.

"I want you to drive me there," I said. "And I want you to wait outside."

"Outside."

"Where I can walk out and find you."

He stared at me.

"You think I'm going to leave," he said.

"You think that after tonight, you'll look back and see what I did.

"Then you'll hate me."

"That's what you think."

"It's what I know."

"Then you know it wrong." I took off my coat and dropped it on the chair. "I hated you for two days. I hated you in the sleet, and I hated you in Agnes's kitchen, and I hated you with a rolling pin in the room."

"Cora."

"I'm not done. Then you told me you stood at the window while I said please.

You'd left it out of the statement because you couldn't type it. I thought: nobody else in the world would have admitted that."

His eyes were bright.

"I'm still angry," I said. "I'll be angry on some Tuesday a year from now.

I know what you did and I know who you are, and I'm choosing you anyway."

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