Two Hearts That Could Never Meet novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The Couch

I sent for him on a Tuesday.

Roxy had talked her landlord into renting me the studio on the top floor of her building, nine hundred a month, with a radiator that knocked.

I paid the first month out of what Leona had spent on four hundred roses.

At six I texted Lawrence: Seven o'clock. Bring a pillow.

At seven the radiator knocked, and so did he.

He stood in the hall in his charcoal coat, with a bed pillow under one arm and a folded blanket from the hotel linen closet under the other.

I stood there and looked at them.

"You said a couch," he said.

"I did."

"I didn't know if you owned a pillow."

"I own three."

"I'll keep this one anyway."

I let him in.

The studio was one room, with a bed under the slanted ceiling and a green velvet couch I'd bought used from a church sale.

He took in the whole of it in a single look, the mugs on the windowsill and the rings of coffee on the table.

"It's small," I said.

"It's yours," he said. "I like it."

He set the pillow on the couch.

"I did something on Friday," he said. "I wanted you to hear it from me."

"Go on."

"I resigned as chair of the Foundation. I asked the board to open an inquiry into every account my mother touched, and I gave them my own signatures first."

I sat down on the edge of the table.

"You'll lose the chair."

"I've lost it."

"It's the thing you were proudest of."

"It's the thing she handed me," he said. "I'd like to find out what I'm proud of without it."

He didn't ask me to say that was enough.

I didn't say it.

I fed him soup from a pot Roxy had left on the stove.

We ate on the couch with our knees a foot apart.

We talked about the radiator and the man downstairs who played the trumpet.

At ten he said good night.

I said good night, and I went to bed, and I shut the door.

I lay in the dark under the slanted ceiling and listened to him try to get comfortable on a six-foot couch.

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