Five of Us at Christmas, But They Only Got Four Cookies novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Five Novembers

That night the children's mother took a room at a motel in Sandusky, with the door chained.

Emmett drove her there and drove back alone.

By ten the shop was dark except for the lamp in the kitchen.

Snow had started coming down outside, fine and dry, and it ticked against the window over the sink.

I was at the table with a pot of tea gone cold.

Emmett stood at the counter with his back to me and Milo's drawing pinned flat under a mug.

He had not stopped looking at it all evening.

I got up and stood beside him.

"Can I ask you something?" I said. "You don't have to answer."

"Ask."

"At the diner you said it took me five years."

He stayed quiet for so long that I thought he wouldn't answer.

"I gave you that napkin on the twenty-ninth of November," he said at last. "Every year on that date I've sat in this kitchen with my phone on the table."

"Emmett."

"I'm not asking you to be sorry. You didn't know me." He turned his head. "But it's been five Novembers. I'd say, this is the year she calls, and it wasn't, and I'd put the phone in the drawer."

"I thought you were a stranger who'd had too much champagne."

"I had a ginger ale."

I laughed, and it hurt a little.

"I had your number in my wallet for all of it," I said. "I looked at it in the grocery store line."

"And you didn't call."

"Because I thought calling meant I'd given up on them. I wasn't ready to find out they'd given up on me."

He nodded slowly.

"That's fair," he said.

"But you hold it against me."

"A little." He did not look away. "I'm sorry. It isn't right. It's only true."

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