They Called Me Barren. They Picked the Wrong Wife novel · Chapter 12 of 24
Chapter 12: The List
Nobody spoke for a long time.
Bev took her glasses off and put them on again.
Down the hall the heating pad clicked, and Courtney turned over in her sleep.
"Will not ask questions," I said.
"Maggie."
"She wrote that about me before she ever met me."
"She'd met you," Callum said. "In a way."
I looked up.
He had not sat down.
He stood with his back against Bev's refrigerator and both hands pressed flat against the door behind him.
"The autumn your grandmother was dying," he said, "I was installing cabinets in the new wing at the hospice. Seven weeks. You were there every night."
My throat closed.
"I slept in the recliner," I said.
"You slept in the recliner with your shoes on and your coat over your knees, and you never once went home. I started leaving a coffee by the door at the end of my shift. Black, one sugar, because you'd left a cup in the hall with the packet still on the lid."
"The man with the paper cups."
"Yes."
"I thought you were a janitor." I laughed, and it came out wrong. "I never looked at your face. You were a pair of boots and a coffee."
"That was fine with me."
"You never said a word."
"You were burying your grandmother. I wasn't going to ask for your phone number."
He pushed off the refrigerator.
His voice had gone rough.
"I told my mother about you. That's the thing, Maggie, that's what I haven't said. At Sunday dinner I told her there was a girl at the hospice nobody was looking after. No family, sitting up all night with an old woman who was going to die. I said she was the kindest person I'd ever seen and I wanted to take her to dinner when it was over."
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