Claimed by My Ex-Husband novel · Chapter 16 of 48

Chapter 16: The Key She Kept

I put the pastry box on the counter with my left hand.

With my right hand I slid my phone out of my cardigan pocket and pressed record against my hip.

"Sit, hon," Noelle said. "You look tired."

I sat.

My cane hooked over the chair, and the tea she had poured for me steamed in the blue mug from the hook.

"I came to apologize," she said. "For all of it. I let that photograph go too far."

"You sent it."

"I forwarded it."

"You stood behind the plant."

She smiled at me the way she always had.

"Is Angelo here?"

"He's parking."

I watched her listen to the house.

The house was silent, and she let her shoulders settle.

Then she set down her cup and looked at me with no warmth at all, and I understood that I had never been looking at her face.

"You never did ask me why," she said.

"I'm asking."

"Ten years." Noelle said it flatly. "I was twenty-one when I started in his father's office. I made the schedule. I made the board like him. I made him a man you could marry."

"And I came along."

"You came along with a lemon tree and a laugh, and everything I built got a wife attached to it."

"So you broke us."

"I moved a piece." She shrugged. "You were already half broken. You waited at home for him for four years. It only needed one push."

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