Now I Watch Her Love Him novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Thursday

Bailey did not explain on Tuesday.

She called in sick, and her desk stayed empty all day, with the camera bag still hanging on the back of her chair.

I did not text her again.

I could not decide which of us I was afraid of.

On Thursday I left work at two and drove to St. Elizabeth's.

I told myself I only wanted to see where my wife spent her afternoons.

The maternity wing is on the east side of the hospital.

Behind it, past a row of dumpsters and a rack of wheelchairs, there is a gate in a low brick wall.

I had walked past that gate twice in two years and never once looked through it.

The garden was small and cold, with bare hydrangeas and a path of pale gravel.

At the far end stood a maple, and under the maple, a wooden bench.

Hannah was already sitting on it.

She wore the gray cardigan and a scarf I did not recognize, and she had her hands tucked between her knees.

I stood behind a holly hedge near the gate, where nobody could see me from the bench.

I was thirty feet away.

I had not been that far from my wife in a public place since our wedding.

A few minutes later the gate clicked behind me, and I stepped deeper into the hedge.

Jonas walked past without turning his head.

He carried a thermos and two paper cups, and he moved down the gravel path slowly, so the stones would not crunch.

Hannah looked up.

I watched her face change.

It was not a large change.

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