His Test Cost Him a Wife, Not a Negotiation novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The Diner

That night, Soren found me sitting on the floor of the department hallway with my phone in both hands.

I had read the lawyer's letter nine times.

"You haven't eaten," he said.

"I ate a granola bar."

"That's not food, that's a promise of food."

He drove me to a diner off the highway, with a counter, six booths and a lit pie case by the register.

A waitress poured two coffees without asking.

I told him everything, in order, in a flat voice.

I told him about the house on Cutler Street, and the note, and the thirty days.

I told him Eleanor had my forty-one thousand in refunds, and that she called everything I paid a gift to her family.

I told him I had eight hundred dollars in the bank, and about six hundred of it was already spoken for.

He listened with his big hands wrapped around his mug.

He didn't say it would be fine.

When I finished, he said, "How much of that did Winslow know?"

"All of it."

"And he still said it was a test."

"He said it was a test, and then he said it again, and then he said it a third time on my father's porch."

"Do you want me to say something about him?"

"I want you to tell me why you thought I was rude."

The words came out before I had decided to say them.

He put the mug down.

"I told you why," he said.

"You told me what. You didn't tell me why."

He looked out the window at the parking lot, at the lights going orange in the snow.

"I'm from Northfield," he said. "My dad has a dairy farm. Sixty cows, a bad knee and a worse hip. I went to the state school on a scholarship, and then I stayed here, because somebody has to go to the people who think they can't come."

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