Chapter 10: On His Knees

On Monday, at five past eight, I had a needle in my hand and a warm blanket over my knees.

That was when my ex-husband walked into the infusion room.

I knew it was him before I looked up.

The whole room had gone quiet in that small, alert way that rooms do when a stranger in a suit comes in.

Twelve chairs.

Twelve bald or capped heads, turning.

Dexter stood in the doorway with his tie crooked and the skin under his eyes the color of a bruise.

He had not slept.

He saw me and stopped breathing.

"Willa."

"You can't be in here," I said.

"I read the emails."

"Dexter."

"I read all of them. Three weeks of them, Willa. The nurse was begging you to come in."

"And you looked at me in my office and said nothing."

He crossed the room.

The nurse at the desk half stood and then sat again.

Dexter stopped at the foot of my recliner.

Then his knees went out from under him.

He knelt on the linoleum in front of twelve strangers, in a suit that cost eleven hundred dollars.

He put both hands on the blanket over my legs.

He was crying.

I had seen him cry exactly three times in ten years, and none of them had been like this.

"I'm sorry," he said. "God, Willa, I'm so sorry. Tell me what you need. I'll sell the house. I'll sell the company shares. I'll sell everything."

Beside me, a woman in a purple turban made a small noise in her throat.

"I don't want anything," I said.

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Gave Him Freedom, He Came Crawling Back in Tears from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.