Chapter 9: What She Checked

Drew's POV

She said sorry four times that night, and I told her it was fine four times.

We ate the burned sauce at the scarred table with the window open.

Hannah sat with her knees pulled up on the chair and told me about the notebook she kept.

She did not tell me what was in it, only that it existed.

I did not ask.

I had spent eleven years moving things people were afraid to look at.

I knew the trick of it: you carry the box and you keep your mouth shut.

At ten she stood and put her bowl in the sink.

"Goodnight, Drew."

"Goodnight."

She stopped in the doorway of the spare room and looked at me over her shoulder.

She did not say anything else, and she closed the door softly.

I stood in the kitchen and listened to the quiet.

I had rehearsed a speech for this.

I had been rehearsing it since the sandwich on the bridge.

It went: if she leaves at minute twenty, you let her go, and you do not stand in the way.

I had never needed to say it out loud.

I washed her bowl and mine, and I went to bed hard and angry at no one.

At five the next morning I heard her get up.

I lay in the dark and listened to her bare feet cross the hall to the kitchen.

She stopped at the stove.

When I came to the doorway, she was standing there in my old gray sweatshirt, looking at the dead clock on the oven.

It blinked twelve, and twelve, and twelve.

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Husband Timed Our Marriage, So I Ran Out the Clock from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.