Dumping My Ex For His Uncle novel · Chapter 25 of 32

Chapter 25: After the Hearing

I didn't watch the rest of it.

I turned my back on the steps and the cameras.

My mate steered me to the truck by the elbow.

"School lets out at three," she said. "Go get your kid."

I was at the curb at 2:50.

Tilly came out of the doors in her purple coat, saw me, and stopped dead on the top step.

She'd known the hearing was today.

She'd made me promise to tell her the second it was over.

I didn't say anything.

I just held up both thumbs.

She screamed so loud a crossing guard turned around.

Then she ran, and I caught her, and her backpack hit me in the ear, and I didn't care.

"Forever?" she said into my neck.

"January twenty-second," I said. "Then forever."

"Is that soon?"

"Six weeks."

She counted on her fingers and ran out of fingers.

"That's soon," she decided.

By six the shop was full.

Bram turned the sign on the red door to CLOSED and ordered six pizzas from the place on Broadway.

My mate came with her husband and her granddaughter, who was wearing the unicorn robe over her clothes as a coat.

My deckhand came still in my father's tie.

The shaved-head artist brought a grocery store cake with blue frosting.

"I asked them to spell it wrong," she said. "They wouldn't."

The bearded artist brought a bag of limes, which nobody ever explained.

Tilly's lawyer came at seven, looking like he'd slept in his car.

Tilly made him tell her a knock-knock joke at the door before she let him in.

"Knock knock," he said.

"Who's there?"

"Lettuce."

"Lettuce who?"

"Lettuce in, it's cold out here."

Tilly looked at me.

"That one's old," she said. "But he tried."

We ate on the counter and the stools and the pale squares on the floor where the chairs had been.

My deckhand stood up with a slice in one hand and a can of ginger ale in the other.

"To the captain," he said. "Who passed her blood test, which her father never would have."

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