Chapter 20: My Lock, My Bed

Weston's POV

Marin stood inside the gate with her hands in her coat pockets.

I closed my hand over the little truck on my knee.

"Sabine's in labor," she said. "Rex texted me."

"I know. He left me two messages."

"You didn't go."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because she asked for nothing from me but the wrong thing," I said. "And because today I'm not any use to anyone."

She walked across the wet rubber and stopped in front of my swing.

"Rex said you keep this day."

"I do."

"Are you going to tell me why?"

I turned the truck over in my hand.

"Someone I loved was born on April twenty-third," I said. "He isn't alive anymore. I come to the place where I would have pushed him on a swing."

It was the truest thing I could say.

She did not ask who.

She looked at the empty swing beside mine for a moment, and then she sat down on it.

The chains creaked.

"Six months," she said.

"I know."

"You never called."

"You told me not to."

"I know I did." She laughed, and it came out unsteady. "I wanted you to ignore me. I wanted you to show up at my door with something absurd."

"I was going to send a check."

"Don't."

"I tore it up in my head."

She put her hand over mine on the chain.

Her palm was cold.

"I read the sale again last night," she said. "I thought, he never read it, and then I thought, he's read nothing else since."

"I've read all of it."

"I know. Every month your assistant left a status report at my office, and I read them all."

I did not say that I'd had no other way to reach her.

"Weston."

"Yes."

Keep reading free with an account. Start Return to the Apex: No More Mr. Nice Guy from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.