Now I Watch Her Love Him novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Service Bay

Dylan ends it with Bailey where the mechanics can hear, and walks into his kitchen to find a stranger on a stepladder making his wife laugh.

I did it Thursday, because Hannah was right and I couldn't stand waiting.

Bailey was in the service bay at ten in the morning, photographing a new pickup for the website.

Two mechanics were under lifts and a third was hosing down the floor drain.

I should have waited for the parking lot.

I had told myself I would, right up until I saw her in the navy dress with the camera against her cheek.

"Bailey."

She lowered the camera.

"You look awful," she said, and smiled. "Did you sleep at all?"

"I need to talk to you. Outside."

"I have the truck for another twenty minutes. The light is good in here."

The radio over the tire machine was playing something with a drum line.

I leaned close and kept my voice down.

"Hannah found the wipe."

Bailey stared at me.

"What wipe?"

"The one in my car. In the passenger seat."

"I checked that seat," Bailey said.

"Clearly you didn't," I said, louder than I meant to.

The man with the hose turned off the water.

Bailey looked at him.

Then she looked back at me, and I watched her decide not to argue.

"What did she say?"

"Nothing. That's the problem. She gave me until six tomorrow to end it with you, and she wants me to say it to your face."

"So say it."

"Bailey."

"Say it, Dylan. I'm right here."

Everyone in the bay had stopped pretending to work.

"We're done," I said. "It's over. I'm sorry."

There was a pause long enough for the radio to change songs.

I had been ready for her to cry or throw the camera.

Instead she lifted her chin and straightened the strap on her shoulder.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay?"

"You've been trying to say it for a month. I can see you've got it out. Good for you."

She reached up and fixed my tie, which had not needed fixing, with two quick tugs.

"Tell Hannah I'm sorry," she said. "I mean it. I never wanted to hurt her."

Then she picked up her camera bag and walked out of the bay with her heels clicking on the concrete.

Nobody said a word.

One of the mechanics, a big man who has serviced my Mercedes for six years, slid back under the pickup without looking at me.

That was how I knew everyone in the building had heard.

My father called me into his office twenty minutes later.

He didn't ask me to sit.

His desk is a slab of walnut the size of a pool table, and he stood behind it with both hands flat on the top.

"Is it what the whole floor is saying?"

"Yes."

"With Corrigan."

"Yes."

"In my building." He said the last two words very slowly. "Thirty years I told your mother that nobody in this family would ever do that to a wife in a building with our name on the door."

"Dad, I know."

"You don't know. You think you know."

He sat down heavily, and for a second I saw how old he was.

"Does Hannah know?"

"She found out Saturday. She's giving me a chance to fix it."

"She is the best thing you ever did," my father said. "Do you hear me? Not the lot, not the Mercedes, not the sales numbers. Her."

"I hear you."

"Then act like it. The anniversary party is on the seventh of December. Two hundred people from the whole county will be in my showroom, and Hannah will be standing next to you or I will know the reason why."

"I'll make it right."

"You'd better," he said. "Because if she takes half, I won't stop her."

I walked out into the showroom with my face burning.

The salespeople were suddenly very busy with their screens.

I drove home early, because I could not stand to be looked at.

Friday I was in the driveway at five fifty-five.

I had a bunch of flowers from the grocery store and a speech I had written on the back of a service ticket.

Through the front window I could see the kitchen light on.

I heard her laugh before I reached the door.

It was a real laugh, low and loose, the kind I had not heard since before the spring she moved her ring.

I stopped with the key in the lock.

Then I opened the door and walked into my kitchen.

There was a man I had never seen standing on a stepladder by the pantry, a drill in one hand and a shelf bracket in his teeth.

My wife was holding the ladder with both hands, looking up at him.

She was still laughing.

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