Contract Over: You're Free to Go novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: What I Believed

Alistair left the ballroom through a side door with his hand on a waiter's shoulder.

Nobody stopped him, and nobody applauded.

Margot and I stayed long enough for the old woman in the lavender coat to take both my hands.

"I'm sorry I only wrote a letter," she said. "I should have knocked on his door."

"You stood up tonight," I said. "It counted."

Then we drove home through the dark with the radio off.

At the townhouse, Timothy was asleep in the armchair with his boots on.

His wife slept on the couch under a blanket, with a bandage taped across her temple, and she had not let go of the corner of the blanket.

Archie was asleep upstairs.

Margot stopped in the middle of the hall and did not take off her coat.

"I have to say something," she said. "Tonight, before I lose my nerve."

"Say it."

"I believed you stayed for the money."

I did not answer.

"For the surgery, for Archie's care, and the flat, and the rules. I believed that if I opened the door at any point in three years, you would take your son and walk out of it, and I'd have no right to be angry."

"You thought I was a prop."

"I thought you were a man who'd been paid to be kind to me."

"Margot."

"And I thought if I said what I wanted, you'd say it was a contract."

"I did say it."

"Once," she said. "In year two."

I took her coat off her shoulders and hung it on the peg.

Then I went out to the truck, got the flat black sketchbook from behind the seat, and brought it back inside.

I put it in her hands.

She opened it under the hall light.

The first page was her hand around a coffee mug.

The second was her profile, asleep on the couch with Archie's head on her lap.

The third was the back of her neck with the hair pinned up.

She turned the pages slowly.

There were drawings of her wrist, her shoulder and her frown over a spreadsheet.

There were her hands, again and again.

"Tattoo artists draw what they can't say," I said. "I ran out of pages in the second book. That's the third."

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