Limited Love novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: After the Applause

The double doors swung shut behind Lacey, and for a long moment nobody in the ballroom made a sound.

Then someone near the front began to clap.

It spread table by table, until three hundred people were on their feet.

Eleanor lifted her cane an inch in my direction.

I did not feel like a woman who had won.

Chadwick's hand was on my back, and I stepped out from under it.

"I'd like to go home," I said.

"Of course."

He did not argue.

He did not ask what Lacey had meant, either, though I saw the question in his face, and I knew he already had the answer.

We sat in the back of his car with six inches of leather between us.

The city slid past the windows in the rain.

He had hired a driver for the evening, and I was grateful for the glass between us and the front seat.

"She remembers," I said.

He turned his head.

"She woke up the way I did."

My voice was very flat.

"She played this week exactly as she played it before. The suite, the shrimp, the green dress that was never going to fit."

"Eileen."

"She's done this before, Chadwick. And so have you."

"I haven't."

"You have," I said. "Every month for three years, in a life that happened to me and not to you. You believed her. You believed a twenty-three-year-old assistant over your wife, every single time, and you never once asked me."

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