Finally Moving On After A Decade novel · Chapter 11 of 24
Chapter 11: Day Eleven
I went into Gino's and stopped beside the bar stool.
Lydia turned her wine glass by the stem.
"Did you enjoy your lot?" she asked.
"What are you doing here?"
"It's the first place you ever took me." Her voice was soft and perfectly steady. "You don't remember. You ordered the lasagna and said it tasted like a school."
I didn't remember.
"I'm not here to cry," Lydia said. "I want you to ask yourself one thing."
"I'm going home."
"Ask why the director of a hospice has Brooks's number saved in her phone." She smiled at me gently. "Ask her what she's been talking to him about all week."
She picked up her glass.
I walked out without answering, and I didn't sleep that night.
On Wednesday at seven the shop was dark except for the lamp over my bench, and the rain was coming down hard on the roof.
The bell rang.
Freja stood in the doorway with a paper bag in one hand and her hair stuck to her cheek.
"The two million cleared this morning," she said. "Friday's payroll is safe. I brought pad thai."
"That's great."
"It's day eleven," Freja said.
I looked at her.
She put the bag on the bench and took a breath.
"I've been thinking about your thirty days all day," she said, "and I've decided I'm a person who can lose an argument with herself."
"Ask me again on the twenty-fourth," I said.
"Nolan."
"That's what you told me. Day ten, you said. Ask me on the twenty-fourth."
"I will push you through that window."
"Day eleven," I said, and she crossed the shop in three steps and kissed me.
We did not make it as far as the pad thai.
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