He Let Me Grieve a Lie, Now He Begs Forgiveness novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Three Steps

The text came at midnight on Monday.

I'm outside. I won't come in. I just need you to know I'm here. Elio.

Chiara read it from the pullout couch with the cat on her feet.

Taylor read it over her shoulder, in scrubs, with her car keys in her hand.

"He left Sunday night and he's back," Taylor said. "Look at him."

Chiara went to the window.

Elio sat on the curb under the streetlight in the rain, in the same black suit, with his head in his hands.

He was exactly three steps from the building's front door.

"You can't leave him in that," Taylor said. "I'm not saying let him in. I'm saying I have a shift, and I'd like to know I'm not coming home to a dead husband."

"He isn't dead."

"He looks it. And Chiara."

Taylor took her phone out and tapped a picture open.

It was a gray still from the clinic lobby camera, time-stamped on a Thursday.

A man in a black suit sat on the bench outside the glass doors, with his elbows on his knees.

"I pulled it myself last month, when I read your chart," Taylor said. "Don't be mad."

"I'm not."

"He is on that bench every visiting day. Thirty-one months. He never signs in. The front desk wrote a note on you once. It says, husband outside, declined to enter, says she doesn't want him."

Chiara looked at the picture.

She had not known it, and she had known it.

For three years she had believed the man who signed her paperwork did it and went home to dinner.

"I'm going on shift," Taylor said. "Let him in or don't. Either way, text me."

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