Dumping My Ex For His Uncle novel · Chapter 21 of 32

Chapter 21: The Answer

He didn't answer right away.

He looked past me at the shop, at the pale rectangles on the floor.

"Not here," he said. "Not by the sink. Will you come up to the roof?"

"It's thirty-eight degrees."

"I know. I'll bring tea."

"Of course you will."

The roof deck was white with frost at the edges.

The two ugly lawn chairs had been folded and leaned against the rail.

He unfolded them and wiped them with his sleeve.

Across the water, the Domino Sugars sign was already lit, red against a sky going purple.

He gave me a mug.

He didn't sit.

He stood at the rail with his back to the harbor so I could see his face.

"I could have told you on the first night," he said. "In the back room, with the tea. I almost did. Then you said Tilly's name and showed me her picture on your phone, and I thought, if I tell her now, she walks out, and that girl goes to Roland Park."

"So it was for Tilly."

"That's what I told myself the first night." He shook his head. "By the second week it wasn't. By the second week you were living downstairs, and she'd named my crabs, and you'd kissed me on my own counter."

He stopped.

He made himself go on.

"After that I was just scared. Not of losing the case. Of you looking at me the way you looked at Ellis on those steps." His voice went rough. "So I said next week. After the logs. After Dundalk. After the hearing. Every week it cost more to tell you, and every week I paid the minimum and kept it."

"That's it?"

"That's it. There isn't a better version. I lied because I was a coward about the one thing I wanted." He looked at me. "I'm not going to dress it up. You'd see through it, and you'd be right."

The wind came off the water.

My tea had gone lukewarm in my hands.

I believed him.

That was the strange part.

For the first time since October ninth, a man had told me the whole ugly truth about himself without a single word to make it prettier.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?"

"Okay, I heard you. It doesn't fix it." I put the mug down on the planks. "There's one more person you owe it to."

He understood at once.

His face went pale under the beard.

"She's eight."

"She asked me if you were in trouble or if we were. She's been crying into her crab for ten nights." I stood up. "She gets it in your words. Not mine."

I called my mate.

She brought Tilly in twenty minutes, in her winter boots with her pajamas on underneath, because it was almost bedtime.

Tilly came through the red door and stopped.

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