Claimed by My Ex-Husband novel · Chapter 3 of 48

Chapter 3: The Warm One

Noelle feeds Tala and says Angelo hasn't slept; he sends her out and takes her key, and at 1 a.m. he lifts Tala onto the kitchen counter until her mocking line stops him, before Tomas turns up at the door and goes white.

Noelle made chicken tinola in my old kitchen, and she knew which cabinet held the good bowls.

I told myself that meant nothing.

She had worked for Angelo for ten years and been in this house a hundred times.

She also had a way of making a room feel looked after, and for five months nobody had done that for me.

"Sit, sit," she said, setting a bowl in front of me on the couch. "Ginger and green papaya. My lola swore it fixes everything."

"It smells amazing."

"Eat it all. You're too thin."

She sat on the arm of the sofa and watched me take the first spoonful.

"He hasn't slept properly in a week," she said, quietly, so the kitchen couldn't hear. "I'm not saying that to make you feel anything. I just thought you should know, because he'll never say it."

"I didn't ask."

"No." Her hand squeezed my shoulder. "But you came. That counts."

I had been prepared for Noelle to be awkward.

I had not been prepared to be so glad to see her.

Angelo came in from the garage.

He had taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, and he stopped at the kitchen door when he saw her hand on me.

"Noelle."

"Dinner's on the stove." She stood and smoothed her blazer. "I can stay over, if you want. In case Tala needs help with the stairs."

"She's in the guest room off the kitchen."

"Then I'll just sleep on the couch, so there's someone."

"Go home."

It wasn't loud.

It was flat, final, the voice he used on vendors.

Noelle's smile held for a full second.

"Of course. Long day."

"Leave the key on the table."

She took a keyring out of her bag and worked one key off it.

She laid it on the coffee table in front of me, not in front of him.

Then she gave me a small, rueful shrug.

"Good night, hon. Call me if you need anything."

The front door closed behind her.

I put my spoon down.

"She cooked for you."

"I know."

"She drove across town with groceries on a Thursday night."

"I know that too."

"Then why would you talk to her like that?"

Angelo looked at the key on the table.

His jaw moved.

"She doesn't need a key," he said.

That was all.

I should have asked a second question.

I was too angry at the man for a different reason, and the tinola was too good.

I didn't sleep.

At one in the morning I got up, found the crutches in the dark, and made it to the kitchen on my own.

I wanted tea.

The tin was on the top shelf, where I had never been able to reach it, and I stood there on one foot looking up at it.

"Stop."

Angelo was in the doorway in a gray T-shirt and sweatpants, barefoot, his hair flattened on one side.

"I'm getting tea."

"You're going to fall."

"You moved the tin."

"I never moved the tin. You never could reach it."

He crossed the kitchen in three steps.

His hands closed around my waist, and he lifted me up onto the counter.

The granite was cold through my thin pajama shorts.

He reached over my head and took down the tin, and for one second his chest was against my knees, and I could feel his heartbeat in the hollow of his throat.

I didn't move.

Neither did he.

His hands were still at my waist.

I felt them shake, just slightly.

Then his hips pressed forward between my knees, hard against the inside of my thigh, and I knew exactly what that was.

I told myself it was one in the morning.

I told myself it was biology.

"Tala," he said, very low.

I put my palm flat on his chest and felt his heart pounding under the cotton.

"Careful," I said. "You're still wearing the face of a man who left."

He flinched.

It was small, but I saw it.

His hands came off my waist, slowly, one at a time.

"Yes," he said. "I am."

He set the tin on the counter beside me and stepped back.

I should have felt like I'd won.

I sat there on the cold granite with the whole front of me burning and my pulse in my ears.

Then the doorbell rang.

Once, then again, and then someone started knocking on the green door with the flat of a hand.

Angelo walked down the hall without a word.

I heard the lock turn.

Then I heard a voice I hadn't heard in five months, thick and slurred and young.

"Gelo, I need to tell you something, she said she'd never..."

The voice stopped.

I had slid down off the counter onto my good foot and made it to the hall on the crutches.

Tomas stood on the front step in a wrinkled shirt with his eyes on me.

The color drained out of his face.

"She told me you were never coming back here," he whispered.

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