He Left at 2 AM for Her Tampons, So I Left for Kenya novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Farewell
At Rosemary's last-night party, Clayton walks through the gate with Marissa's suitcase and says they are only friends. She hands him divorce papers, he refuses to sign in public, and she asks Alec for the extension. Clayton announces he's staying too.
On my last night at the clinic, forty people were singing me goodbye when my husband walked through the gate carrying another woman's suitcase.
The suitcase was pink.
The head nurse stopped mid-verse and the singing thinned out, one voice at a time.
I was standing on a crate with a plate of chapati in my hand, because the children had insisted I be taller than the speeches.
"Rosemary!" Marissa called, waving with her whole arm.
She was wearing a white linen shirt that had not seen one hour of lake road dust.
Behind her, Clayton put the suitcase down and gave me the grin that used to get him out of parking tickets.
He was sunburned from the forehead to the collar.
He had lost weight, ten pounds at least.
"Hey, Romy," he said. "Surprise."
Nobody laughed.
Marissa crossed the yard and hugged me before I could put the plate down.
"You look amazing," she said into my hair. "Your mom sends love. I'm over there every Sunday, so I'll tell her you're still thin as a rail."
I patted her back with the hand that wasn't holding chapati.
"Thursday, right?" she added, pulling away. "The 6:10 out of Nairobi? We booked the same flight."
"That's the one," I said.
My mother must have told her. She told everyone everything.
Clayton came up beside her and put his hands in his pockets.
"Okay," he said. "Are you still mad?"
I looked at him.
"Come on, Romy. It's been three years. Marissa and I are friends. We've been friends since we were nineteen and nothing has ever happened."
He spread his hands to include the whole yard, the lanterns, and forty witnesses.
"If something was going to happen, it would have happened by now."
My face didn't move.
Wanjiru, the head nurse, took off her reading glasses and cleaned them very slowly.
"You left at two in the morning," I said. "I was in bed. You said Marissa needed you."
"She did need me!"
"For tampons."
Somebody near the back made a small sound and turned it into a cough.
"She was stranded," Clayton said, and his ears went red. "It was an emergency."
"At two in the morning," Wanjiru said to the yard, not quietly. "In what country is a shop open at two in the morning?"
Marissa put a hand on her chest. "Honestly, that's on me. I felt terrible about it for months."
She looked so sorry that for a second I felt sorry for her.
Then I climbed down off the crate and set the plate on it.
My bag was hanging on the gate post where I'd left it that afternoon.
I took out a long white envelope and walked back across the yard.
"What's that?" Clayton said.
"The third set."
"The what?"
"I left the first one on the kitchen counter. I mailed the second and third to your office. You sent one back with a sticky note on it."
I held out the envelope.
"It said, Nice try, Romy."
"I thought you were cooling off," Clayton said. "I figured you'd come home and we'd laugh about it."
"Sign it."
"Here?"
I took a pen from my breast pocket and held it out with the envelope, so there was no hand free for him to put in his pocket.
"There are forty people watching," he said, and he lowered his voice.
"That's why it's here."
"Clayton," Marissa said gently, "maybe not in front of everyone."
"Thank you," Clayton said to her, and he meant it.
He didn't take the pen.
I put the envelope in his shirt pocket anyway, and the pen on top of it.
"Carry it around, then."
Behind him, at the edge of the lantern light, Alec Reeve was leaning against the clinic wall with his arms folded.
He was the clinic's director and had hired me three years ago, and he hadn't said a word since the gate.
That morning he had offered me a two-year extension, and I had said no, because I was flying home to my mother's kitchen on Thursday.
I walked over and stopped in front of him.
"Dr. Reeve," I said. "Is the extension still open?"
"Until midnight," Alec said.
"I'll take it."
His eyebrows moved a quarter inch.
"Rosemary," Clayton said behind me. "What are you doing?"
"Staying," I said.
So I stayed.
Clayton looked at the clinic, at the dark lake behind it, at the lanterns and the staff and the pink suitcase on the dirt.
"Fine," he said. "Then so am I."
"You live in Ohio," I said.
"I took eight weeks of leave before I booked the flight."
Alec's face did not change, but I knew it well enough by then to see him enjoying himself.
"We're always short of volunteers," he said. "There's a latrine that needs digging."
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend