My Best Friend Changed Boyfriends Weekly... Until She Chose My Ten-Year Fiancé novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Day Six

In Willem's half-built house he tells her what Mallory did on day six. She hears only a betrayal, sets terms for a boyfriend of the week to take to Diane's birthday dinner, and answers his one question.

Willem drove the way he talked, slowly and without any extra words.

His truck smelled like sawdust and coffee.

I sat with my two bags in my lap and my ring in my fist.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"My place. It has a couch. And a door that locks."

"I don't know you."

"No," he said. "You know Mallory. Look how that turned out."

I laughed once, and it came out wrong, and I pressed my knuckles against my mouth.

He didn't say anything else until we had parked outside an old brick house with scaffolding on one side.

He restored houses for a living, and this one was the one he was living in.

Inside, half the ceiling was bare beams, and the kitchen had a new sink and no cabinets.

He moved a stack of lumber off the couch and found a clean blanket.

Then he opened the truck's glove box for napkins, because I had started to cry without noticing.

A thick manila envelope slid out onto the seat.

He caught it and shoved it back in and shut the box, fast.

"What's that?" I said.

"Not mine."

He handed me the napkins and nothing else.

I let it go.

I was thinking about Edgar's hand on her hip.

In his kitchen, with a mug of tea he'd made by pouring boiling water over a bag and then forgetting it, I made him tell me about day six.

"I met her at a coffee shop, the Sunday before last," Willem said. "She asked if I had plans for the week. I said no. She said, 'Good, you've got a girlfriend, until next Sunday.'"

"That's what she says to all of them."

"Yeah. It was a pretty good deal, honestly. I'd just finished a job and I was bored."

He turned his mug a quarter turn on the counter.

"But she wouldn't eat in front of me. Not once. She'd order, then push it around until I looked away."

"She does that."

"She kept her coat on in my truck with the heat blasting. And she never let me stay in a room with her unless the door was open."

"She's careful with new people."

"On Friday she went into my bathroom and locked it for forty minutes."

He looked at me.

"I heard her talking through the door. She said, 'Not yet.' Three times. Like someone was asking her something."

"A boy was texting her."

"That's what I thought."

"Then what's the problem?"

He didn't answer, so I answered for him.

"She was getting ready to take my fiancé. She had a script. 'Not yet' meant she was waiting for the week to be up."

Willem said, "Could be."

"It is," I said. "She went through fifty men and picked the one man in the world I'd never have let her have."

My voice went high on the last words.

He stood very still and let me finish.

I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes.

"I'm not going to fall apart in your kitchen," I said.

"You can."

"No. I'm going to be on a plane to Denver tomorrow morning, and then I'm going to find somewhere to live, and then I'm going to take it back."

"Take what back?"

"The ten years. The ring was never the thing. It was the way they did it. Forty people watching me find out."

I opened my hand and looked at the ring.

"Edgar's mother is turning sixty-one next Friday," I said. "There's a dinner at her house. The whole family goes. All his friends, all Mallory's friends. And Edgar thinks I'll show up with a casserole."

"Will you?"

"I'll show up with someone."

I looked at him.

He caught on slowly.

"You want me to be your date."

"Mallory had a boyfriend of the week. Why shouldn't I?"

"You're angry."

"I'm very organized about it."

He almost smiled.

"What are the rules?" he said.

I had never made rules before in my life, and they came out of me all at once.

"One week. Monday to Sunday, same as hers. It ends at midnight on Sunday, whatever happens."

"Fine."

"You only touch me when Edgar or Mallory can see."

"Fine."

"And nobody falls for anybody."

His eyes lifted to mine.

"That's a joke," I said.

"Is it?"

"I just got out of ten years. I'm not falling for a man with a half-built kitchen."

He took my wrist then, lightly, with two fingers, and turned my hand over to look at the ring.

His thumb rested against my pulse.

It was a small touch, and it went through me.

I didn't pull away.

"I want one thing first," Willem said. "A straight answer to one question."

"Ask."

He let go of my wrist.

"When you stood at that table tonight, and everyone was watching. Which one of them were you looking at?"

I thought about lying.

"Her," I said.

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