The Diary of an Unloved Wife novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Across the Hall

The caterers had gone quiet behind me.

I took my coat out of Winslow's hands.

"Loved," I said. "Past tense. You taught me how to stop."

I put it on myself and did up every button.

He watched me do it with that small, private smile.

"You're shaking," he said.

"It's cold."

"It's not that cold, Margery."

I walked out past him into Washington Square and didn't look back.

Halfway down Bleecker Street my phone buzzed.

It was a text from Winslow, a photo with no words.

It showed the front of my building on Bank Street, taken from the sidewalk across the road that afternoon.

My window on the fourth floor was circled in red.

I stood on the corner and looked at it until a man with a dog asked if I was all right.

On Wednesday Malachy carried a bookshelf up four flights of stairs for me.

I'd found it on the curb on Perry Street and he'd said that was a crime against furniture.

He went up backwards with the heavy end, swearing cheerfully at every landing.

On the fourth floor we stopped.

The door across the hall from mine was standing open.

Two movers in grey uniforms were carrying a leather sofa through it.

The apartment had been empty since I arrived.

The landlord had told me it was too expensive for the street.

A man came out of it in shirtsleeves, with a phone to his ear.

It was Winslow.

He saw me and lowered the phone.

"Neighbor," he said.

Malachy set his end of the bookshelf down very slowly on the landing.

I stared at Winslow's sofa.

It was the grey one from the library at Louisburg Square.

He'd had it moved from my father's house before I changed the locks.

"What are you doing here?"

"Living here, as of today. I'm opening an office for the foundation in New York." He looked at me, at Malachy, at the bookshelf. "You always used to say you wanted to live across from someone you could see."

I had never said that to him.

I'd never said it to anyone.

My back went cold.

The door at the end of the hall opened and the old woman in 4D peered out in her housecoat.

The young couple from 4B came up the stairs with their groceries and stopped behind Malachy.

"You leased an apartment across from your wife," Malachy said, "who left you."

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