My Best Friend Changed Boyfriends Weekly... Until She Chose My Ten-Year Fiancé novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Through the Door

I sat down on the floor with my back against Willem's front door.

On the other side of the wood I heard her sit down too, with a small grunt, the way she always did.

It was the first time in ten years I had been that close to her without a table between us.

"You don't have to open it," Mallory said.

"I'm not going to."

"Okay."

Willem looked at me from the end of the hall.

I nodded, and he went into the kitchen and shut that door behind him.

"Say it," I said. "Year four."

She was quiet for a while.

Her coat rustled against the porch boards.

"After the stairwell, you blocked my number," she said. "You blocked Edgar's too, for about a week, and then you let him back in."

"I remember."

"Six weeks in, my dad had a heart attack at his desk."

I put my hand over my mouth.

"He was fifty-eight," she said. "He died in the ambulance. I didn't call you, because you had told me to stay away from you. And I thought if I did call, you'd think I was using him."

"Mal."

"Your mom didn't know. Nobody from school knew. I told my mother's church and the man at the funeral home."

"I didn't come."

"You didn't know."

I pressed my forehead against the door.

I had liked her father.

He cut the crusts off my sandwich the day we moved into the dorm, because he said a nurse needs her strength and her dignity.

He called me "the nurse" for the rest of his life.

"Edgar came," Mallory said.

I didn't move.

"He stood at the grave in a black suit, and he held my mother's arm, and everyone said what a good young man."

"Mal."

"When they lowered the box he put his hand on my back. He said, this is the worst day of your life, and I'm still here. Be my Friday."

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