He Called Our Night a Mistake, So I Raised His Daughter Without Him novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Wednesdays and Saturdays

Sullivan asked me for the plain version on a Wednesday, over Rosetta's cereal.

She had gone to find her shoes.

The cream card from Whitney Slingsby still stood against the sugar bowl, where we had both been not looking at it for four days.

He sat across the kitchen table with his hands wrapped around a mug and his shoulders set.

"I'm not going to court," he said.

I put down my toast.

"Not now, not later. I'm telling you so you stop waiting for it."

"I wasn't waiting for it."

"You were. You sit down at the table the way a person sits when somebody has a gavel."

I looked at my plate.

He was right.

"Here's what I'm asking," he said. "Wednesdays and Saturdays with her, as long as you want me there. Every other holiday. The job of fixing whatever breaks at your house. I'm staying in Asheville until Rosetta tells me to leave."

"She won't."

"Then I'm staying a long time."

"What else?"

"One more thing."

He hesitated.

I had never seen him hesitate over anything but me.

"Dinner," he said. "Just us. A real one, where I pick you up at your door and bring you home at the end of it."

"We've had dinner."

"We've had Thai food in your kitchen. I've never taken you anywhere. I've never done one thing in the right order."

"Sullivan."

"Say no if it's no."

I thought about the porch and the pantry aisle and a narrow bed in Norfolk.

I thought about how I had never once been courted.

"Yes," I said.

He closed his eyes.

"Yes?"

"Friday. Seven. You'll have to ask the neighbor to babysit, because I'm not asking her."

"I'll bring her a pie."

"Bring her two."

He picked me up on Friday in a clean shirt, and he knocked on my own front door.

I opened it in a green dress I had bought four years ago for a wedding I didn't go to.

He looked at me and forgot his speech.

"Hi," he said finally.

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