The Wife He Left Behind novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Her Door

Stellan's POV

Cassia didn't throw me out.

I would have understood it if she had.

She stood at the kitchen counter with her back to me and said, "Go and ask her."

"Cassia."

"You didn't ask her in March. Go and ask her now, to her face, and then come back and tell me what she said. Or don't come back."

I went.

I drove across the city in the truck with the heater broken and the thermos going cold in the cup holder.

I had raised Camille from the age of fourteen.

I had signed her permission slips and sat through her braces and burned four hundred grilled cheese sandwiches.

And in March I had looked at a photo of her mouth on a married man's jaw, and I had put my phone in a drawer.

I'd told myself she was a grown woman.

What I had meant was that I was tired of being the only adult in the house.

The building on Westlake had a buzzer panel with six names.

4C said only REINER.

I leaned on it with my thumb.

After a while the speaker crackled, and her voice said, "Tobias, did you forget your key again?"

"It's me, Cam."

Nothing.

"Open the door."

The lock buzzed.

She was standing in her doorway on the fourth floor when I came up, in leggings and one of Tobias's shirts.

She was big.

I hadn't been ready for how big.

Her hair was pulled back, and her face was rounder, and she held one hand on her belly without seeming to know she did.

For a second she was fourteen, and I'd come home late from work.

Then her chin lifted.

"You look terrible," she said.

"You look pregnant."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Wife He Left Behind from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.