The Woman He Traded Is Now His Equal novel · Chapter 12 of 24
Chapter 12: The Glass Door
Byron's POV
She came into my office at four o'clock and shut the door behind her.
She did not sit.
I stood up from my desk because I could not stay in the chair.
"Porter says you were at the hospital the night my mother died," Natasha said.
I had known this question was coming for three years.
I had rehearsed answers to it in the car and in the shower and at three in the morning.
None of them survived the sight of her face.
"Yes," I said.
She waited.
"My father died in that building. Fourth floor, the cardiac unit. He went about an hour before your mother did. I came down to the lobby to get away from my family, and I took the wrong stairwell."
"And you saw me."
"I saw a young woman sitting alone in the family room, with a coat in her lap and no one beside her. A nurse came in and crouched in front of her. I could not hear anything through the glass."
Natasha's hand closed on the back of a chair.
"I watched you take it in," I said. "I've never seen anyone do that so quietly. You just folded your hands."
"You didn't come in."
"I didn't know you. I was a stranger with a funeral of my own to go to. I told myself you'd have somebody." I made myself keep looking at her. "I walked to my car. I've thought about that walk more than I've thought about my father's service."
Her eyes were wet, and she was not trying to hide it.
"A year later I read a proposal that beat me by a hair. I looked up who wrote it. There was a photograph on the firm's site."
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