He Thought I'd Forget novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: Her Face on a Cover

Clark read it over my shoulder with his chin against my hair.

Then he picked his shirt up off the floor and put it on over the missing buttons.

"When was that taken?" he asked.

"I don't know. That's the point. I was asleep."

The pillowcase had the little gray stitching along the hem that ours had.

My braid was in it.

So it was before Jeanine's scissors, and after the pill.

"He photographed you sleeping," Clark said. "For a book cover."

"For two," I said.

The attorney said not to go.

She said it three times on speaker that night.

"He will have a publicist, a crowd and a story ready. You will look like a woman who wandered in."

"I'm not going to wander," I said. "I'm going to stand in line."

Jeanine was already pulling hoops out of a dish by the sink.

"I'm coming. I'm wearing the big ones."

Clark looked up from the floor, where Davey was trying to eat his shoelace.

"I could bring the canoe," he said. "For emphasis."

On Saturday the bookstore downtown had a line out the door and down the block.

Mostly women my age and older, holding copies of the first book.

The Woman Who Wakes Every Morning.

My back, my white nightgown, my window, over and over in their arms.

Inside, a poster on an easel by the register showed the new cover four feet tall.

My closed eyes. My hair on our pillow.

SHE CAME BACK.

"I cried for a week over the first one," a woman ahead of us told Jeanine. "He's so devoted."

"He's something," Jeanine said.

We waited forty minutes.

Clark held Davey and let him chew a bookmark.

Byron sat behind a stack of new books in a soft gray sweater, signing with a fat black pen.

Alexis stood at his elbow in a cream wrap dress, handing him each book open to the title page.

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