The Night He Chose Her Over Me novel · Chapter 9 of 24
Chapter 9: Witnessed
I woke up in the gray hour before dawn with a man's arm across my waist and no idea where my left shoe was.
The stove had burned down to coals.
Out the window, the harbor ice was the color of old pewter, and a freighter sat far out on the water with its lights on.
Gabe was awake.
He lay on his side, watching me, with a look I did not have a name for.
"You're staring," I said.
"You snore."
"I do not."
"A little. It's nice."
I elbowed him, and it did not hurt at all.
That was how I knew my ribs had healed.
He went down to the shop and came back with coffee in two chipped mugs and half a loaf of Agnes's rye, and we ate it sitting up in bed with the blanket around our shoulders.
My eyes kept going to the funeral program on the wall.
He saw.
"I'm not going to ask," I said. "That's the rule."
"I know." He set his mug down. "I'll give you the part I can. My father died at ten that night, at the hospital on the south side. I left after they took him away."
"Gabe."
"I was driving home when I came up on your car."
The words came out slowly.
I put my mug down and took his hand.
It was the one that shook.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm so sorry. And you stopped for me anyway."
His face did something complicated.
"Anyone would have stopped."
"Dalton wouldn't have."
He turned my hand over and kissed the center of my palm.
"I'm not Dalton," he said.
It was a plain fact, and it sounded to me like a promise.
I made myself believe it.
Agnes was at the ovens when he dropped me at the shop at seven.
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