She Took My Husband on My Wedding Night, I Didn't Find Out Until We Gave Birth Together novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Two Contractors

Cormac tells Clem he was sent here too, and when she walks past her husband's car to his truck, Bradford threatens to take Margo.

"Too," I said.

My voice came out like a crack in ice.

"You said too."

Cormac rubbed his face with both hands.

"I've practiced this conversation for five years," he said. "In the truck. In the shower. It went better in the shower."

"Say it badly, then."

"I'm from Pittsburgh," he said. "The real one. I was a paramedic there. I was twenty-seven. We hit black ice on the Parkway and the rig went over the rail."

He said it flat.

"I woke up in a bunk at Engine 41 in a uniform with my name sewn on it. There was a voice in my head. It told me I was the hero of a book."

"The Kingsford Heir's Obsession," I said.

"I never read it. My sister did. She said the hero was a fireman. That was the whole pitch."

"What was your job?"

He looked at the wall, toward the room I'd left.

"Make Valerie Vickery fall in love with me."

I laughed, and then I covered my mouth, because it wasn't funny.

Except it was a little funny.

"Go on," he said. "I've earned it."

"How did that go?"

"I came into the bar every Thursday for five years. She liked the uniform. She didn't like the guy in it." He shrugged. "She liked men with buildings."

"I never saw you there."

"You were in the kitchen after the alley. Baking pies for the bar menu." He paused. "I asked about you once. Valerie said you didn't want to see anybody who reminded you of that night."

I didn't remember being asked.

I'd have said yes.

"She said that," I repeated.

"She did."

I filed it away somewhere cold.

"And this morning?" I said.

"4:19," Cormac said. "I was restocking the rig in the bay. The voice said the heroine's story had closed with another man. Contract failed. Did I want to go home."

"What did you say?"

"No."

"You have a sister."

"I have a sister." His jaw worked. "I said no anyway."

"Why?"

He looked at Margo, then at me, then at the pudding.

"Ask me when you've slept," he said.

So I told him mine.

The bench in South Station. The job. Six years of teaching a man like Bradford to laugh, to call his grandmother, to say thank you to waiters.

Then this morning.

I told him what the voice had said after I refused.

"The original ending is restored. On the night of Margo's first birthday, the Kingsford house burns. No one inside survives."

Cormac sat back.

"Who sets it?"

"I don't know. I fell asleep at chapter one-fifty."

"Is it an accident?"

"I don't know."

"Does the book say why?"

"I don't know, Cormac. I don't know the ending. I just know the date."

He nodded slowly.

"April 9," he said. "Next year."

"Three hundred and sixty-five days."

"Three sixty-four," he said. "Today's almost over."

"Is that a joke?"

"No. That one was just math. You'll know when it's a joke. Nobody laughs."

I laughed.

He looked pleased with himself, which was worse.

They discharged me the next afternoon.

Cormac came back with a rear-facing car seat still in the box.

"I installed it in the truck already," he said. "Then I uninstalled it and did it again. Professional hazard."

The nurse wheeled me down with Margo in my arms and my hospital bag on my knees.

The doors slid open on cold April wind.

Bradford's black car was parked at the curb.

He was leaning on it in a charcoal suit, arms folded.

Beside him stood a man in a gray coat with a leather folder.

And a few steps back, a man with a camera.

"Clementine," Bradford said. "Get in the car."

Cormac's red pickup sat twenty feet beyond, flashers on, in a spot marked for ambulances only.

"Is that legal?" I asked him.

"I'm going to say yes and keep moving."

The nurse stopped the wheelchair.

I stood up.

Everything below my waist complained again.

I walked anyway, Margo against my chest, straight past the black car.

Bradford didn't move.

"You're making a scene," he said quietly.

"I'm making a left."

The camera clicked behind him, then kept clicking.

Cormac opened the passenger door of the truck and held my bag while I climbed in.

I strapped Margo into the car seat myself, the way the nurse had shown me, and checked the buckle twice.

People had stopped on the sidewalk.

A woman in scrubs with a coffee was openly staring.

Bradford came around the front of the pickup, unhurried.

He stopped at my window and waited until I rolled it down.

"I told your nurse what I saw, and she charted it," he said. "You talking to someone who wasn't in the room. Saying no to nobody. Saying you weren't leaving her."

His voice was pleasant.

He'd learned that from me too.

"My lawyer is filing for emergency custody of my daughter this afternoon," he said. "Enjoy the truck."

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