Chapter 14: Five Hundred Feet

I stood on the walkway with the ice bucket in my hand.

Terrence was thirty feet away.

The protection order said five hundred feet.

"You can't be here," I said.

"I'm on the public road, Lexi. I'm having a conversation with my wife in a parking lot."

"I'm not your wife in any way that matters."

"You still wear my ring."

I looked down.

I had forgotten the ring.

It was on my finger, where it had been for five years, and for one cold second I could not tell if I had forgotten it or been afraid to take it off.

"Come home," Terrence said. "We can talk about the money like adults."

"Whose money?"

He smiled.

"You went in the safe. I heard. Your brother's a sentimental man, he keeps everything."

"You took a hundred and eight thousand dollars from him."

"I held a note for him. I was generous." He pushed off the car and came a step closer. "You want to know the best part?"

"No."

"He took the deal in a minute. I thought I'd have to work for it. I'd planned a whole speech. He said yes before I finished the second sentence."

My mouth had gone dry.

"He sold you, Lexi. Eighteen hundred a month, and he never once asked how you were."

"Stop."

"The year you were sick with pneumonia, I told him you might not pull through."

I remembered that winter.

I remembered the hospital, and nobody visiting.

"He said, 'Is she all right?'" Terrence went on. "That's all. Then he asked if the first Friday was still on."

"That's a lie."

"Is it?"

He was close enough now that I could smell his aftershave.

It was the one he wore to church.

My right hand had set down the ice bucket without asking me.

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