My Husband Pretended to Love Me novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Slide Show

Carl's garage had been hit in the night.

Both bay windows were smashed, and somebody had sprayed red paint across the door in letters two feet tall.

SELL.

He stood in the middle of the glass in his work boots, holding a push broom he hadn't used yet.

"Four hundred dollars of glass," he said. "She could've just sent a card."

"Carl."

"And my mother's going to see it from the kitchen window."

"Then we'll clean it before she gets up."

"Here." He dug in his pocket and held something out. "It was in the gutter behind the dumpster. I'm not telling you what to do with it."

It was the ring.

I closed my hand around it, and I put it in the coffee tin on the shelf he had built me, behind the sugar.

I did not look at it again that day.

The following Sunday the Thornquist Foundation held a donor luncheon at the Lake Forest Club, and the catering agency was short three servers.

I took the shift.

Stanley hadn't known I would, and I'd told no one at the diner but Carl, who wanted to come with a wrench.

I wore the agency's black vest and white shirt and carried a tray of crab cakes into a ballroom with a hundred people in it.

It was the room where I would have to bring down a bride in two weeks.

I looked at everything.

The speakers hung from the ceiling, four of them, black and square, and the sound booth sat behind a glass partition at the back, with a tech in headphones.

I noted every exit.

Lydia stood at the front in a cream suit, and she did not look at me once.

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