He Shelved My Designs, Then Crashed Into My Bed novel · Chapter 10 of 24
Chapter 10: The Alley
Ward zipped his trousers in the alley behind Bonneau Made and waited for Tobin Laurens to stop shouting.
It took a while.
Tobin had dragged him out the back door by the sleeve.
He was a stocky man in a loud shirt with a sunburned nose and a nurse's voice that cut through brick.
Ward had faced down the board of a sixty-one-store company.
He found he would rather not do it with a macadamia nut stuck to his shoe.
"Do you know," Tobin said, "what he said at my rehearsal dinner?"
"No," Ward said.
"He said, and I quote, 'If Ward Gibbes fell in a river I would pull him out so I could push him back in.'"
"That sounds like him," Ward said.
"He was sad when he said it. That's the part that stays."
Tobin jabbed a finger at Ward's chest.
"He cried in a bathroom the night he found out your company shelved the line. I stood outside and handed him paper towels under the door."
Ward stood very still.
He had pictured many things about the last two years, and not one of them had a bathroom in it.
"I didn't know that," he said.
"Because you never called him."
"No," Ward said.
"Why not?"
It was the question Ward had been asked by his lawyers, and his uncle, and the mirror.
He had never given anyone an answer.
"I couldn't think what to say," he said.
"That's it?" Tobin said.
"He was angry. He had every right. I'd have had to explain everything, and I couldn't."
"Couldn't," Tobin said.
"I'm not good at it," Ward said.
"Well, you're good at one thing." Tobin looked at the sky and said a short word to it.
"You're my wife's cousin. I like you. I gave you a piece of cake at my wedding."
"It was good cake."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Shelved My Designs, Then Crashed Into My Bed are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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