Chapter 7: Dormont

My father's house had a front porch with a rotten second step.

He had been meaning to fix it for six years. I knew because he'd said so every Christmas.

I had spent Friday night at the kitchen table with a legal pad, writing one line over and over.

The renewal. What did Braden need signed that Lenora knew about and I didn't?

I had typed every contract in that firm for three years, and I could not remember one renewal with his name on it.

On Saturday morning I stood in his kitchen in his flannel shirt, boxing up his coffee mugs.

Someone knocked on the screen door.

It was the woman from next door. She was seventy-something, in house slippers, holding a casserole dish with both oven mitts.

"Tuna noodle," she said. "Your father hated it. He ate it anyway. Sit down and eat before you fall down."

"You don't have to do that."

"I know." She marched past me and put the dish on the stove.

"Emmett fixed my furnace every winter for nineteen years and never let me pay him. This is me paying him."

She patted my cheek once, hard, and left.

I stood there with a fork in my hand, smiling for the first time in a week.

At eleven there was a second knock.

Alexander stood on the porch in jeans and an old gray sweater, with my laptop bag in his hand.

"You left it in the file room," he said. "I thought you might need it."

"On a Saturday."

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Fiancé Chose My Best Friend-At My Dad’s Funeral from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.