The Other Man in My Wife's Tent novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Please Come Home

"Take the boy Friday," Freja read aloud for the third time.

We sat in her truck outside the clinic at dawn, with the cheap black phone between us on the dash.

"It's Tuesday," I said.

"Which gives us three days."

"To do what?"

"I don't know yet. But he's going to try something that doesn't need a judge."

She turned the phone over.

It had a passcode, and she had tried every date she knew in his life.

Her anniversary hadn't worked.

His mother's birthday hadn't worked.

The sixth try was the date Eli was born, and the screen opened.

Freja stared at it.

"He used his son's birthday," she said, very flat. "Not mine."

She scrolled.

The phone held one thread, six years deep, and it was mostly small and dull.

Lake temperatures.

A grocery list for Tent Three.

A picture of a pair of mittens Lindsay had bought for a boy who was only a few months old.

Then, last October, a plain line from Dean: "After the gala I want him on my side of the table. The school list first. Then the court."

"The school list," I said.

"What list?"

I didn't know.

I found out on Thursday evening.

I came home from a meeting with my new lawyer, a gray-haired woman with a terrible cardigan and a very good mind, and found Lindsay sitting on the porch steps in the cold.

She had Eli's rain boots in her lap.

She had been there a while, and her nose was red.

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