When Love's Sorrow Plays Again novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Family Day

"I don't need to ask you," Julius said in the car, before I could say anything.

We were parked outside the stone house with the engine off.

My hands were still shaking from the dining room.

"You should."

"Did you forge my name?"

"No."

"Then I'm done."

"Julius, you don't know that."

"I know your handwriting. I know the way you hold a pen. I know you cried when you signed the lease for your first apartment, and you'd have cried a river if you'd forged a cheque." He turned to me. "I know you."

I had to look out the window for a minute.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay."

On Wednesday, Ellery's school held its fall breakfast.

It was called Special Friends Morning, and the sign on the gym door was in crayon.

I came in my work cardigan with a travel mug of coffee.

I had told Julius that he did not have to come.

He was already inside, standing in the middle of the gym with a paper crown on his head.

Six first-graders had him cornered by the juice table.

"Okay, okay," he was saying, with a very serious face. "Let me get this straight. A conductor does not play anything."

"Nothing?" said a boy with a missing front tooth.

"He waves a stick."

"That's a dumb job."

"It's the worst job," Julius agreed. "But I have the stick."

He held up a pencil, and they screamed.

Ellery had hold of his left sleeve.

She hadn't let go since I walked in, and she kept looking up at him.

"This is my dad," she told a girl in a unicorn shirt. "He's from Vienna."

"Is that in Minnesota?"

"It's in the whole world."

"Wow."

I stood in the doorway with my mug and felt my chest go tight.

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