He Chose My Sister, But Now He Wants Me Back novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Café on South Avenue

Garrick lies about the northern border over tea. At the fabric studio Linnet cancels her last order and sees the heather stitched inside his cuff.

Garrick's message came on the morning of March fifth.

Café on South Avenue, three o'clock. I have some things I'd like to say in person.

It was brief and formal, like every message he had sent since he came home.

I went.

He had taken a table on the second floor by the window, with two cups of tea already poured.

He stood and pulled out my chair.

"Is it cold out?"

"Not very."

The tea was Southbay green, the kind they sell in tins with a gold fish on the lid.

I did not touch it.

"Linnet, these years haven't been easy for you," he said. "You were willing to wait. I haven't forgotten that."

"Is that what you wanted to say?"

He turned his cup a quarter turn on its saucer.

"After we're married, you'll have my name in public. Respect, security, a good house. You'll lack for nothing."

He had said respect, and security, and responsibility.

He had not said love, and he had not said that he wanted to spend his life with me.

"Garrick, I want an honest answer to one question."

"Ask."

"Where were you for the last five years?"

Downstairs the espresso machine hissed. At the next table a man talked about quarterly numbers.

"The northern border," Garrick said. "The mission went classified and every private line was cut. I couldn't reach you."

He said it without a pause, and he said it smoothly.

"Then why did twenty trucks of wedding gifts come up the Southbay highway last week?"

He looked at his thumb on the rim of his cup.

"The dealers were in Southbay. It was cheaper to ship straight from the source."

"I came back to the capital with the Guard convoy from the northern base."

His phone buzzed on the table.

The screen showed one letter, B, before he turned it facedown.

"Have you heard something, Linnet?" he asked.

"People said I was dead, and people said I had gone over to the enemy."

"I don't want that kind of talk to touch you."

When he said the word hurt, his face did hurt.

It was so real that for a breath I thought he had never lied to me.

"I haven't heard anything," I said. "I was only asking."

His shoulders came down.

"After the wedding I'll take you to Southbay. The coast is beautiful. You'll love it."

For a moment his eyes went somewhere else, to a beach I had never stood on.

That promise had not been made to me. He was handing me his memory of another woman.

"All right," I said.

He looked surprised, then pleased.

"Then it's a date."

I smiled at him and watched the tea go cold.

Afterward I walked to the fabric studio on the next block.

The owner knew me well.

For five years I had bought cloth there to cut shirts and coats for a man who was not in the city.

I made them to the measurements he left behind. Light shirts for spring, jackets for autumn, overcoats for winter.

When he came home I sent the cedar chest of them to his apartment.

He glanced inside and said I had gone to a lot of trouble.

Then his aide carried it off.

Days later I saw one of his guards pushing the chest to the back of a storage closet.

"The Commander's shoulders have broadened," the guard said, embarrassed. "What Miss Ashworth sewed is too small on him now."

None of it had been worn.

"Do you still have the light blue wool I reserved?" I asked the owner.

"I've kept it aside for you."

"Please refund it. I won't need it."

She hesitated, then did it without a question.

I put the receipt in my coat pocket and I did not make a single thing for him again.

On the walk back I thought of the shirt he had worn to the planning meeting, dark gray, with a good collar.

I had stood close enough to him at the table to see inside the cuff.

A sprig of heather was stitched there, no bigger than a thumbnail, in green thread.

I knew the stitch. Bridie put it on everything she made, even as a little girl, on the backs of her dolls' dresses.

He had sat across from me, in a shirt she had sewn, and talked about the grand wedding he was giving me.

The clothes I made hung in a closet.

The clothes she made were the ones he put on.

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