He Forgave My Affair, But He Never Touched Me Again novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Guest Room

Two years later Darcy and Keith live politely under one roof, until she sees the chef standing outside the twins' preschool.

Two years later, my husband still poured my coffee before his own.

He set the mug on the counter at six every morning, handle turned toward me, and stepped back so our hands never met.

"Thanks," I said.

"You're welcome."

That was our whole conversation most days, and it was never rude.

Keith was kind to me every single day, and he never once came close.

Down the hall, two small people were thumping around in their beds, which meant it was time.

"Daddy!" June yelled. "Milo took my boot!"

"I didn't!" Milo yelled back. "It's my boot!"

"You have two boots each," Keith called. "I counted them last night."

He went upstairs to settle it.

I stood in the kitchen and listened to him explain that a boot was not worth a war.

They would be four in two weeks, on the ninth of November.

I made the guest room bed with hospital corners, because it was something I could finish.

I never asked him to forgive me.

I never asked where he was when he came home late from the water department with sawdust on his boots and a smile for the kids.

I did the things I was allowed to do.

I made his lunch, and he ate it.

Every night the empty container came back washed and set by the sink.

I went to every one of his mother's Sunday dinners and sat across from him and laughed at the right places.

Connie watched me through those dinners with her reading glasses on her chain and her mouth in a flat line.

"More potatoes, Darcy," she'd say, and she'd put them on my plate before I answered.

That Sunday, Milo told the whole table he had seen a dinosaur in the yard.

"It was a squirrel," Keith said.

"It was a squirrel dinosaur," said Milo.

Keith laughed, really laughed, with his head back.

I looked down at my plate so nobody would see my face.

He had not laughed like that with me in two years.

On the porch afterward, he buckled June into her seat and I buckled Milo.

When I held out the backpack, he took it by the strap and not from my hand.

I noticed.

I always noticed.

On Monday I opened the shop at seven and finished two sympathy arrangements.

At nine I drove the twins to preschool.

The preschool was a low brick building behind a chain-link fence, with paper pumpkins taped in every window.

June ran ahead of me with one red boot on and one in her hand.

Milo held my fingers and counted the steps.

"Twelve," he said at the gate. "Mama, who's that man?"

I looked where he was looking.

Across the street, a black car was parked at the curb with its engine running.

A tall man in a gray coat stood beside it with a paper coffee cup, his black hair gone silver at the temples.

He wasn't looking at the school.

He was looking at my children.

I had not seen that face in two years, except on the side of a bus.

It had been on the bus shelter outside my shop for a month.

The ad was huge, with a headline about his new national cooking show.

My hand tightened on Milo's.

"Nobody, baby," I said. "Go in with June."

"He's smiling at us."

"Go in."

I watched them both through the door, past the teacher, past the cubbies, until the door closed.

When I turned around, Preston Dade lifted his cup to me.

I crossed the street before I had decided to.

The black car pulled away from the curb before I reached it.

On the pavement where he had stood, the paper cup sat upright, still warm in my hand when I picked it up.

I stood there holding it, with the school bell ringing behind me.

He had waited two years to stand across the street from my children, and he looked happy about it.

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