He Came Back for Both of Us novel · Chapter 24 of 32
Chapter 24: The Night Before
I didn't tell anybody else until the cake was gone.
Then I told all of them at once, on the porch, with Benji asleep across his grandmother's lap.
Ollie said a word his husband made him put a dollar in the jar for.
Jameson's mother said, "I'll be there," before anyone asked her.
Jameson didn't say anything.
He just reached over and took my hand on the table, in front of everyone, and nobody pretended not to see it.
We drove to Nashville on the twenty-sixth.
My own street wasn't mine anymore.
Since the night on my porch, there'd been a van from a TV station parked across from my house most days, and a woman with a ring light on the sidewalk.
So Benji went to Ollie's, to the blue bungalow and the biscuits and the garage studio.
He packed his own bag. Plates, the shark hat, and his tooth that wasn't his.
The rest of us checked into a hotel downtown.
The lawyer booked it. She booked Jameson's mother a suite on the ninth floor, and two rooms side by side on the fourteenth.
Two rooms.
Nobody said anything about it.
The night before the hearing I lay in mine and stared at the ceiling.
I could hear the city fourteen floors down. Somebody singing on Broadway, badly.
I kept seeing Lisette in a courtroom.
Her soft voice. Her hand on my knee.
I discovered her crying in a coffee shop, you guys.
A judge would look at me and see a girl who sold her baby's face for three years.
Because I had.
At eleven I got up.
I was wearing a pair of sleep shorts and an old gray sweater with a hole in the cuff.
I'd taken it in one of my two suitcases. I'd never told anybody that.
I walked out into the hall in my bare feet and knocked on the door next to mine.
He opened it before I'd finished knocking.
He was in a white T-shirt and gray scrub pants, and his reading glasses were pushed up on his head.
He looked at the sweater.
He didn't say anything about it.
He just stepped back and let me in.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of He Came Back for Both of Us are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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