Forgotten Groom in the Back Alley novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Section Nine

Jude's POV

I was still feeling Hazel's pulse under my fingers when the front bell rang.

I knew that voice before I reached the foyer door.

"Hazel, isn't it?" Yvette said. "You run this place so beautifully. I'd hate for anything to hurt it."

I stopped in the doorway, out of her sight.

Hazel stood very straight in front of her with the clipboard against her chest.

"Is something going to hurt it?"

"Oh, no." Yvette smiled. "But a hall's name is everything, isn't it? And I'd hate for the board to hear that Shanahan Hall is hiding a man who has made false claims about his director. A man with a very unhappy file at Human Resources."

Her assistant looked at the floor.

"The file was withdrawn," Hazel said.

"Files come back."

"Do they?"

"Everything comes back," Yvette said gently. "Jude always did."

I walked out then.

Yvette turned, and for a second her face was only surprised, with nothing arranged on it.

Then the soft look came down over it again.

"There you are, love." She held out her hand. "Come home. We can fix all of this over dinner."

I did not take the hand.

"You have a coat on a hook in a stranger's house," I said. "I would say that's the one thing you can't fix."

"It's a coat."

"You bought it."

"And you wore it for three winters," she said. "Because you liked it."

Her assistant looked at me, and then at her phone, and kept looking at it.

Behind me a door banged, and Dot came out of the kitchen drying her hands on a towel.

She walked past me and stopped in front of Yvette.

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