At a Charity Auction, My Husband Sold My Best Friend the Seven Days He Promised Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Moving Day Is Monday

The joint account is empty and Neil is nowhere, so Bethany moves her shop by hand with June, and learns the studio deposit is due Friday.

I sat in the car with the engine off and opened our bank app.

The joint account held four hundred and twelve dollars and eighteen cents.

On Thursday it had held twenty-nine thousand.

Twenty-five thousand of that was my deposit for the new studio, saved over three years of selling throws at the farmers market.

A transfer had gone out at 4:40 that afternoon, to an account ending in 0931.

It was not my account.

My phone lit up with a text from Neil.

Don't be dramatic. It's seven days for charity. Open the store without me, you've got June.

He had written it from the stage, with his arm around her, while I walked through the lobby.

I did not answer.

I called June instead.

She picked up on the first ring, the way she had every time since I was nineteen and she taught me to warp a loom.

"Where are you?" June said.

"In a parking lot."

"Is it the husband?"

"It's the husband."

"Stay put," she said. "I'll be at your door at five."

I drove home.

The apartment was dark.

His closet door stood open, and four shirts were gone from the hangers.

The calendar was still on the refrigerator.

Monday said, in his square handwriting, Truck at 7, wall in, lights.

I took it down, folded it in half, and put it in the drawer with the takeout menus.

Then I sat on the bathroom floor, took the test out of my purse, and looked at the two lines again.

I had not told him.

I was not going to tell him tonight.

June's flatbed pulled up at five on the dot.

She came up the stairs in her canvas jacket with two thermoses, looked at my face, and held one out.

"Decaf," she said. "I didn't know if you'd want the real thing."

I drank it.

Then I told her all of it, standing in my kitchen, in about four minutes.

June listened without sitting down.

"And the wall?" she said at the end.

"On a truck on Larch Street."

"Then we move what we have."

By seven o'clock we were at the old storefront.

My two part-timers were already on the sidewalk, a college student in a faded Badgers sweatshirt and a retired nurse who worked Mondays and Tuesdays, and I did not need to tell them anything.

They had both seen the gala photos.

We wrapped the throws in tissue.

We carried the looms out one rail at a time and strapped them onto June's flatbed.

I dropped a box of bobbins, and June knelt on the sidewalk and picked up every one without saying a word.

At nine, my phone rang.

It was one of Neil's foremen, a man I had known for six years, and he kept his voice low.

"Bethany, I'm sorry," he said. "Neil told us Truck 4 is on a private job this week. He said not to bother you."

"Where's the crew?"

"Larch Street. Hanging a wall."

I stood in the doorway of the empty shop and looked at the pale squares on the floor where my shelves had been.

"Whose wall?" I said.

"He said it's the owner's."

"Thank you for telling me."

"He said you'd be fine," the foreman said.

I hung up.

The smell of the tissue paper and the thermos coffee hit me at the same time, and I walked to the alley and threw up behind the dumpster.

June followed me out.

She handed me a paper napkin from her pocket and waited until I straightened up.

"How far along?" she said.

I stared at her.

"I raised two boys," June said. "Four years of trying, you told me. A man doesn't pack a bag for a woman who's about to have his baby. Does he know?"

"No."

"Good," she said. "Keep it that way until you know what you're doing."

I laughed, and then I was crying, and she held my elbows in her work gloves until I stopped.

At noon we were at the new studio, standing in the empty room under the north windows.

The leasing agent met us at the door with a folder.

"Ms. Morrow," she said, "I'm glad you're here. There's a problem with the deposit. The bank returned the hold this morning."

"I'll fix it."

"Of course. But I have another tenant who wants this space, and my office says I have to give them the lease on Friday at noon if the deposit isn't in."

She looked at me, then at the windows.

"Twenty-five thousand," she said. "By Friday at noon."

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