Quitting this Family after Being Abandoned for Laughs novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: You Wouldn't Ever Leave Me

On Friday Colin took me to lunch at the steakhouse where he had proposed.

He pulled out my chair, ordered my wine before I looked at the menu, and held my hand across the white tablecloth.

My phone sat face-up beside my plate with the voice recorder running.

"I've been thinking," he said. "About what I did on Wednesday."

"Okay."

"I laughed. I shouldn't have. You were out there alone and I laughed with them."

He looked down at our hands, then up at me, with his eyes wet and steady.

Two nights ago I would have cried at that.

"It's already forgotten," I said.

"No, it's not. That's what scares me." He rubbed his thumb along my ring. "Promise me you'll always tell me when I hurt you. Promise you'll never just go quiet and leave."

The waiter set down two plates between us.

"I promise I'll always tell you," I said.

It was a true sentence. It was also not the one he had asked for.

He smiled with relief and cut my steak for me.

For forty minutes he told me about the Saturday seating chart, the string quartet his mother had hired, and the toast he had written about me.

He read it aloud with a hand on his heart.

It said that I was the calmest, kindest woman he had ever met.

It said that no matter what the world threw at me, I never complained.

I smiled at every line of it and slid my fork under another bite.

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