On Our Fourth Anniversary, My Husband Posed for Maternity Photos with Another Woman novel · Chapter 17 of 24
Chapter 17: The Old Man
Rupert's grandfather lived in a brick house in Whitefish Bay with a greenhouse in the back garden.
I had met him four times in four years, always at Marianne's table.
He always sat at the far end and said very little.
A nurse in blue scrubs let Rowan and me in through the garden gate on Saturday morning.
"He's in with the orchids," she said. "He asked for you by name."
The greenhouse was warm and smelled of wet soil.
He sat in a wheelchair between two benches of white flowers.
A blanket lay over his knees, and a pair of pruning shears sat in his lap.
He was a small man, bald and spotted, in a cardigan buttoned wrong.
His eyes were pale and sharp.
"Sit," he said. "Not you, young man. You can stand by the door and look useful."
Rowan stood by the door.
I sat on an overturned crate, with my coat still on.
"Did you bring it?"
I took one of the vials out of my bag, wrapped in tissue.
Rupert's block capitals ran across the tape.
The old man held out a hand, and it shook.
I put the vial into it.
He turned it under the light.
"I founded that company in a rented warehouse when I was twenty-eight," he said. "I knew every man on the floor by his first name. I never read a label I didn't need to."
"Sir," I said.
"Be quiet a minute, girl. I'm explaining myself."
He peeled the tape up with his thumbnail, quite steadily, and looked at the label beneath it.
His mouth thinned.
"Sodium chloride," he said. "Yes. I thought so."
"You thought so?"
"My daughter-in-law has kept a locked cabinet in that house since the day she married my son." He put the vial in his cardigan pocket and patted it. "Boxes, bottles, all labeled in her hand. She was a pharmacist for thirty years. I told myself it was habit."
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