My Ex-Husband's New Wife Asked Me to Take Him Back novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Soup

Adele's sister lived in a condo in Holland with a gas fireplace and a refrigerator covered in kindergarten drawings.

The sister was out for the day.

Adele had left me a note on the counter that said Hide the cookies from yourself, and she had put soup in two blue bowls.

It was chicken and dumplings.

I tried to be hard about it, and the first spoonful made me quit.

"This is unfair," I said.

"My grandmother's recipe."

"Your grandmother is cheating."

Adele laughed, and then covered her mouth.

"Sorry. I've been nervous since Tuesday."

"You walked into my store and said it to my face. I don't think you're the nervous kind."

"I threw up in the school parking lot afterward."

"Oh," I said. "Good."

"I thought so too."

We both ate for a minute, with the fire ticking.

Outside the window, the October sky had gone the color of dishwater.

"I'd like to tell you how it happened," Adele said. "You can stop me."

"Go on."

"Six years ago I moved to Port Averill for a teaching job and I knew nobody. Gabe was the electrician who came to fix the lights in my classroom. He stayed an extra hour to help me hang a paper whale from the ceiling."

"That sounds like him."

"It does, doesn't it?" She turned her spoon over. "He was so kind and so careful. It took us four years to go on a date. I didn't know he'd been married until my second month."

"He didn't say."

"He said one sentence. 'I was married once, and it ended, and that was my fault.'"

I put down my spoon.

"It was not his fault," I said. "It was mine as much as his."

"He wouldn't hear that. I tried."

"Of course he wouldn't."

"When he proposed, he told me everything." She said it plainly, with no edge. "Your name, Chicago, the key. He said, 'I can't promise I'll be over her.' I said I could live with that."

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