My Husband's First Wife Died a Saint, Then I Found Her Key novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The Back Stairs

Edie's POV

We were home by nine, and we sat down to breakfast with Beatrix.

She asked whether I had slept.

I said I had slept very well.

Patrick buttered his toast with great care, and neither of us could have told you what it tasted like.

All day I watched the house the way you watch a patient who has been told nothing.

Beatrix moved through it with her cane and her pearls.

She had no idea that her son's first wife was drinking coffee three miles away.

At night I could not sleep, and at midnight I went down to the back stairs.

They were the old servants' stairs, narrow and steep, with a window at the turn.

I sat on the third step in the dark with my knees pulled up.

I heard his boots on the kitchen floor before I saw him.

"Edie."

"Go to bed, Patrick."

He didn't move. "You don't sleep in the back of the house. You sleep in a bed I'm in."

He sat down on the step beneath mine and turned so he could see my face.

The window threw a pale square of moon across the stair.

"Say it," he said.

I looked at my hands.

"She's your wife," I said.

"She was my wife."

"She's alive. She's on a paper somewhere, and she's got the grey eyes and the scar and seven years of you. I have a contract you tore up and a suitcase under the stairs."

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