The Home She Built With Someone Else novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Outside the Tower

My mother was sitting on the bench beside the glass model of the city with a roast beef sandwich in her lap.

I had not told anyone in Pittsburgh I was coming back to a lobby.

"Gus brought it down," she said. "A man with a mustache. He said you're too thin."

"Ma."

"I like him. He told me everything in four minutes. Go see the girl first, Nathaniel. I'm not going anywhere."

I went out through the revolving door.

It was raining on Wacker Drive, steadily, the cold kind.

Justine stood across the sidewalk from the entrance, under the edge of the building's awning, with her cardboard box and no umbrella.

She had been crying and had stopped.

The plant in the box was soaked on one side.

"I wasn't going to come in," she said. "I didn't know where else to go. I don't have a key to anywhere."

"You have a sister in Portland."

"She doesn't want me either."

I stood a few feet from her.

I had stood on a lot of pavements in five years waiting for Justine to finish a call.

"I want to ask you something," she said. "And I want you to say the true thing, not the kind one."

"All right."

"If none of it had happened. If Nigel hadn't done any of it, and I'd put the deed in your name that day. Would you have stayed?"

I thought about it, because she deserved that.

"Yes," I said.

"Then it's all my fault."

"No. That's the true thing, and it's not the whole of it." I kept my voice level. "You didn't do this because you hated me, Justine. You did it because you were sure I'd let you."

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