Not His Wife novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Ohio

Anson's POV

I told her before I went.

That was the rule, and I stood in her mother's kitchen on Sunday afternoon and said it plainly.

"I'm going to Cleveland tonight. I want to see where Alyssa lived before me."

"Why now?"

"Because Joyce said 'the others,' and Alyssa has never done one thing only once."

Ivy leaned on the counter with her arms crossed.

She wore my shirt again, with the sleeves rolled to her elbows.

"You're asking me to let you go."

"I'm telling you where I'll be. I'll text you from every stop."

"Every stop?"

"Every one."

She considered that.

Then she took a loaf of her aunt's pound cake out of a cake box, wrapped half of it in foil, and put it in my hand.

"For the plane," she said.

"Ivy."

"Go find out how many of us there are."

I kissed her, and she let me, and it was a long time before I got out of the house.

I landed at ten and slept four hours in an airport hotel.

At eight on Monday I stood on a street of narrow houses in Cleveland, holding a three-year-old envelope.

It had come to my store after Alyssa left, forwarded twice, from a dentist.

The address on it was a blue house on Rowan Avenue with a white porch and a dying hydrangea.

I had sent a process server there once.

He had found no one home and stuck a note on the door.

I had never gone myself.

I had told myself it was a dead end.

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