He Married My Best Friend While I Gave Birth, So I Left novel · Chapter 30 of 48

Chapter 30: The Card

Byron's POV

I told Lacey at breakfast where I was going and why.

"Tara asked me to come see his room," I said. "I'd like to see where he's lived."

"Go," said Lacey, with Poppy on her hip. "I've got the clinic, and I'll be home by four. Don't pay her rent, and don't promise him anything."

"Both of us, or neither."

"Both of us." She tapped the lawyer's card on the table, the Dayton number still inked on the back. "And if Ray's number shows up anywhere in that apartment, you photograph it and you don't call it."

She kissed me at the door.

I drove two and a half hours north on the interstate with the radio off.

Tara and Cal had left that morning.

She'd written her address on the back of a cider receipt, and I read it three times at a rest stop before I got back in the truck.

The building was brick, on a street a block from the river, with a stoop and a row of dented mailboxes.

The hall smelled of onions and radiator dust.

On the second-floor door, at eye level, someone had taped an orange sheet.

It said Three-Day Notice to Leave the Premises, and under it, in smaller type, a date.

Tara opened the door before I knocked.

"You saw it," she said.

"I saw it."

"Don't say anything."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were going to say what Lacey said, that it isn't yours to pay yet." She stood aside. "It isn't. Come in."

The apartment was two rooms and a kitchen, and every surface in it was clean.

On the wall over the couch were sixteen school photographs in matching frames, in a row.

I looked at the first one.

He was four, in a dinosaur shirt, with his mouth open and no front teeth.

I looked at the next one, and the next, and I understood that a woman who couldn't afford shoes had bought sixteen frames.

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