Eight Months Pregnant, My Husband Locked Me in a Freezing Cabin for His Ex on Christmas Eve novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Whitney's Second Phone

At eleven forty, I was sitting on the edge of Eli's spare-room bed with my coat still on.

The room had a quilt, a lamp, and a bolt on my side of the door that I had already slid shut twice just to hear it.

Rhonda sat in the armchair with her phone on her knee.

"She said midnight," Rhonda said.

"It isn't midnight."

"I know what time it is, Hallie. I'm only saying it out loud so one of us does."

We heard Eli in the kitchen, lacing his boots.

At eleven fifty-four, someone knocked on the front door with the flat of a hand.

Eli opened it before I reached the hall.

Whitney stood on the porch with no hat. There was snow in her dark hair and mud to the knees of her jeans, and she was holding her left hand against her chest.

"I walked," she said. "Two miles. I left my car in the driveway so she'd think I was in bed."

"Come in," Eli said.

"Her housekeeper's going to find the bed empty at six."

"Come in."

She came in and sat on the arm of the couch, shaking.

Eli took her hand and turned it over. A long scrape ran across the palm, where she had caught the fence.

"It needs cleaning," he said. "Rhonda."

"On it."

Rhonda took the first-aid kit off the shelf and knelt in front of her. She was gentler than I had ever seen her.

I stayed standing.

"You said midnight," I said. "You said don't call."

"I know."

"Did you get it?"

Whitney laughed, a short, wet sound.

"Joyce took my phone at nine," she said. "She always does when she wants a quiet dinner. She put it in the drawer by the stove, and she was right. It was the only phone she looked for."

She reached under her coat and into the waistband of her jeans.

She pulled out a small grey phone with a cracked back, the kind you buy at a gas station.

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