He Thought I'd Forget novel · Chapter 12 of 32

Chapter 12: The Suitcase

The dustpan tipped and my hair slid back onto the floor.

Nobody picked it up.

"When?" I said. "What time?"

"Late. After ten." Jeanine sat back on her heels. "You were in the car. I could hear the blinker. You said, 'Neenie, leave the porch light on. I'm leaving him. I'll explain when I get there.'"

Neenie.

Nobody had called her that since we were kids.

I'd said it seven years ago and couldn't remember saying it.

"Leaving him," I said.

"You sounded happy," Jeanine said. "Scared, but happy. Like when you quit the bank job to paint signs."

"And then?"

"And then you didn't come." She swallowed. "And at one in the morning he called from the hospital."

The kids had gone very quiet on the stairs.

Clark had Davey on his knee and wasn't moving at all.

"I told Byron about the call," Jeanine said. "In the ICU hallway. He held my hands and said you two had had a silly fight about paint fumes in the apartment. He said you'd been confused for weeks. That the doctors thought the confusion might have been an early sign."

"An early sign of what?"

"He never said." She looked at the hair on the floor. "I believed him, Lee. I believed everything he said that whole year."

I looked down at my hands.

The crash took five weeks before it.

Five weeks I'd spent seven years assuming were nothing. Grocery lists. Laundry. Byron and me, happy.

But I'd packed a suitcase.

I'd called my sister.

I'd gotten in the car at ten at night and said I was leaving him.

In my head I was still twenty-four and in love with him, and the twenty-four-year-old had already walked out the door.

Jeanine signed her statement at seven the next morning.

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