He Forgave My Affair, But He Never Touched Me Again novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Stack of Photos
Keith lays photos of Darcy's affair beside her shop register and says either he goes or he takes the kids. She ends it in front of the chef's kitchen staff, and Keith says he will keep her choice but never forgive it.
Keith walked into my flower shop at the Saturday wedding rush and set a stack of photographs beside my register.
A bride's mother was at the counter, waiting for me to ring up forty white roses.
"Finish your sale," Keith said. "I'll wait."
He said it so gently that I did.
I counted out her change, my hands trembling.
The bell over the door rang behind her, and then it was only me, my husband, my assistant frozen at the cooler, and the photographs.
The top one showed me in a parked car with Preston Dade's hand on my knee.
The one under it showed us outside a hotel two hours from home, my coat open, his mouth at my ear.
"I paid a man to follow you for two months," Keith said. "I hoped he'd come back with nothing."
"Keith."
"I'm not going to yell. Not here, not at home, not in front of the kids."
His hand lay flat on the photographs, perfectly steady.
"Either he goes," he said, "or I take the kids and go."
My assistant picked up a bucket of tulips and carried it to the back room.
I heard the door close behind her.
"They're yours," I said. "They're ours, Keith."
He looked at me for a long moment.
"I know what they are to me," he said.
Then he turned and walked out, and the bell rang again.
I stood there with my hand on the register drawer.
Six years of marriage, and he had never once walked out of a room on me.
I knew exactly what I was choosing.
I had a husband who made me coffee the way I liked it, and two babies who were almost two years old and slept with their feet in each other's faces.
I had a man who ordered flowers for his restaurant every week and told me I was the only person in Columbus who understood him.
I'd been standing between the two of them for almost three years, and I was done.
So I picked up my phone and called Preston.
"I need to see you," I said.
"Now? Sweetheart, it's Saturday. Dinner prep."
"Now."
I locked the shop and drove across town.
Dade's was dark in the afternoon, with the chairs still upside down on the tables.
His line cooks were in the open kitchen, peeling shallots under the pass.
Preston came around the counter wiping his hands, smiling at me.
"Darcy! You're white as a sheet. Somebody get her a coffee."
"No coffee."
Six cooks stopped working.
"My husband has photographs," I said. "Of the hotel, the car, all of it. It's over, Preston."
"Let's talk in the office."
"We're talking here."
I opened my phone to the contact he had asked me to save as Dade Supplies, years ago, so my husband wouldn't see his name.
I blocked the number where he could watch me do it.
"I'm going home to my family," I said. "Don't call, don't send flowers back, and don't come near my shop."
His smile stayed on his face, but his eyes did not.
"You're upset," he said quietly. "We'll talk when you've calmed down."
"We won't."
I walked out through the dining room while a dishwasher stared at me, and I didn't cry until I was in the car.
At home, the front door was open.
Keith's mother, Connie, was on the porch with her purse on her arm and her reading glasses pushed into her gray hair.
She looked at my face and said nothing.
She just kissed my cheek and handed me June.
"Dada!" June shouted over my shoulder.
She meant Keith, standing in the hall with Milo on his hip.
Milo held out both arms to me and then changed his mind and put them around his father's neck instead.
Keith reached for his wallet to give his mother money for the gas.
Behind his blood donor card were two paper bracelets, curled and soft, each small enough to circle my thumb.
I knew them.
They had been on the twins' ankles in the hospital.
He saw me looking, and he closed the wallet.
After Connie left, after the bath and the books and two small bodies finally asleep, I found my suitcase packed on the guest room bed.
"I didn't pack it for you to leave," Keith said from the doorway. "I packed it so you wouldn't have to go into our closet tonight."
"Thank you."
"You'll sleep here. You won't ask me to forgive you. You won't ask where I am."
"For how long?"
"I told you. He goes, and you stay. You did that."
His voice was calm, the way it had been in the shop.
"I'll keep your choice, Darcy," he said. "I won't forgive it."
He closed the door softly, and I heard him go down the hall to our bed alone.
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