Chapter 7: A Stranger in My Kitchen

Dalton's POV

I let myself into my own house with my own key and found another woman's boots on my mat.

They were small and brown, set neatly side by side under Noelle's yellow rain slicker.

The kitchen light was on, and the place smelled of onions and butter.

Colette stood at my stove in my wife's apron, stirring something in my wife's blue pot.

Arlen sat in a high chair I had never seen, banging a wooden spoon.

"There you are," Colette said.

She turned with a smile so relieved it hurt to look at.

"Your mom said you'd be late, so I made dinner. It's her chicken and rice, she gave me the recipe."

"Where did the high chair come from?"

"Your mom brought it from the diner storeroom. Isn't she wonderful?"

"Colette, you can't be here."

Her smile didn't drop. It softened.

"I know. I told her it was too much."

"But the water rose to my ceiling, Dalton, and the landlord says three weeks."

"She wouldn't hear no."

"I'll put you in a motel."

"With a baby?" She said it gently, not as an accusation. "And with what money?"

I opened my mouth.

I closed it, because I was the one who paid her rent, and we both knew the answer.

"Two weeks," she said. "Your mom said two weeks, and I'll be so quiet. Noelle will never even have to know."

"Noelle already knows. I told her this afternoon."

I walked through the rest of the house with the lights off.

The guest room had a suitcase open on the bed and a baby monitor on the nightstand.

I went up the stairs to the room at the end of the hall.

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