Finally Moving On After A Decade novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Lobby

The message was only forty seconds long.

It was dated three years ago, the night I asked Lydia to marry me.

I remembered that night.

I had cooked, and she had cried, and I had slept with her hand on my chest.

"Hi, it's me," Lydia said on the recording, warm and a little breathless. "He did it tonight. I'm wearing the ring. I wanted you to hear it from me first."

Brooks sat very still across the table.

"You think he'll leave when he finds out how many times I call you," Lydia's voice went on, playful. "He won't. Nolan never leaves a person who needs him. And he'll never leave if he thinks you're dangerous. So I'll tell him you are."

There was a pause, and the sound of a glass being set down.

"Don't you dare change your number," she said. "I mean it."

The file ended.

Nobody spoke for a while.

"I kept the same number for ten years," Brooks said. "I thought if she had a place to put it, she wouldn't take it somewhere worse."

"You could have told me."

"I did. I stood outside your shop for an hour."

I put the yellowed envelope deeper in my jacket and stood up.

My phone buzzed against the table.

It was Freja, and her text was short.

"Lydia is in my lobby."

I was at Fairhaven House in nineteen minutes.

It was a low brick building with twelve windows along the front and a lobby that smelled like coffee and lemon cleaner.

On Thursdays the families came at one for tea.

Twenty of them sat in the armchairs with paper cups, and Lydia stood in the middle of the rug in her mother's gray cardigan.

She held a stack of cream-colored pages against her chest.

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