Two Hearts That Could Never Meet novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Hotel Soap

Lawrence comes to Roxy's shop at dawn claiming he spent the night at the hospital with Leona, and Millicent sets one rule: never alone with her; then a photo shows him entering the Hotel Marlow at 2 a.m.

Roxy's couch has a spring in it that finds your left kidney.

I slept on it in my gala dress, with her cat on my feet, and woke up at six to someone knocking on the door downstairs.

"Don't," Roxy said from the bedroom.

"I know who it is."

"That's why. Don't."

I opened it anyway.

Lawrence stood in the shop doorway with snow on his shoulders and the same tuxedo he'd worn last night.

The bow tie was gone. His collar was open. There was a cut on the back of his hand from the glass.

He looked like he hadn't sat down once.

"Millicent."

"You look terrible," I said.

"Can I come in?"

"It's a flower shop. Nobody can stop you."

He came in. The cold room hummed behind the counter, and the whole place smelled of eucalyptus and wet stems.

Lawrence looked at the buckets of roses for a long moment before he spoke.

"She's alive," he said.

"I noticed. We all did. Three hundred of us."

"Her car went into the river eight years ago. They never found her. I went to the funeral. I buried an empty box." His voice was rough. "And last night she walked down my mother's staircase."

"Where was she for eight years?"

"I don't know yet. She isn't well. She says her heart is failing, that she has months." He rubbed his face. "She collapsed in the car. I took her to St. Anne's and I sat there until it was light."

I looked at his shoes.

They were dry, and the soles were clean.

"That's a lot of snow for a man who sat in a hospital all night," I said.

"I walked here."

"From St. Anne's? It's four miles."

"I needed to think."

He said it so quickly that I let it go.

I don't want to pretend I was smarter than I was. I was tired, and I loved him, and he was standing in my best friend's shop with a cut on his hand.

"What do you want from me, Lawrence?"

"Come home." He took a step toward me. "Just for a few days. Let me move her to my mother's guest house, get her seen by real doctors, and find out the truth. I'll handle all of it. You never have to talk to her."

"You want me to wait in the house while you take care of her."

"I want you to be where I can find you."

"You couldn't find me last night," I said. "You were standing three feet away."

He flinched.

Good.

"You said, Not now, Millicent. In front of the whole city."

"I know."

"Do you know what I was doing when you said it? I was standing there with my hand out."

"I know," he said again. "I'm sorry. I couldn't think. She was dead, Millicent. She was dead and she was standing there."

"Then here's how it works."

I held up one finger.

"You don't see her alone. Not once. A nurse in the room, your mother in the room, a doctor, anybody. If you're alone with her, I'm gone."

"Millicent."

"Say yes or say no."

He didn't take a long time. I'll give him that.

"Yes."

"Say it properly."

"I won't see her alone." He swallowed. "I swear it."

"You have until Friday to fix whatever this is. After Friday, I decide."

"And the ring?"

"It's on the table at the gala. Ask whoever's counting the silver."

He took a small velvet box out of his coat.

The four-carat oval sat inside it.

"Constance's driver found it," he said. "My mother wants you to have it back."

I looked at it.

I wanted it. I'll say that plainly. I had worn it every day for three years, and my finger felt naked and stupid without it.

"Keep it till Friday," I said.

He closed the box.

He bent and kissed my forehead, and I let him, because he smelled like him under the snow and the hotel soap.

I stood there after the door shut and realized what I'd just smelled.

Hotel soap.

Not hospital soap. The hospital used the pink kind that stuck to your skin.

This was lavender, and it was the soap in every suite the Thackeray Hotel Group owned.

Roxy came out of the bedroom in a T-shirt and her enormous slippers.

"Well?"

"He says he spent the whole night at St. Anne's."

"Okay."

"He smelled like the Marlow."

She didn't ask how I knew.

She picked up her phone from the counter, scrolled with her thumb, and handed it to me.

It was a gossip blog. The photo was grainy, taken from across the street.

A man in a tuxedo was walking into the Hotel Marlow with a white wool coat over his arm.

The timestamp said 2:07 a.m.

The man was my husband.

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