He Invited His Ex-Wife Home, But She Was Here for Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Last Bottle
Kaitlyn finds Glen in the hot tub with his ex-wife and her own pinot, walks out with the bottle, and Gabe tells her Glen invited Mindy here on purpose.
I called Glen's name three times from the front hall before I heard a woman laugh.
It came from the backyard, through the open kitchen window.
It was a low, easy laugh, and it was not mine.
I put my bag on the kitchen counter and walked to the sliding door.
My scrub top still smelled like the clinic. I had worked a twelve-hour shift and held a Labrador's head while he came out of anesthesia.
All I wanted was a shower and the last bottle of pinot I had been saving since Christmas.
The pinot was already open.
It stood on the edge of the hot tub on the cedar deck, with the cork lying beside it.
Glen was in the water up to his chest, leaning back with his arms along the rim.
A woman sat across from him in a black two-piece with her dark blond hair twisted up. She held my wine glass, the one with the blue stem.
Candles burned on the deck rail. The jets were on low.
Neither of them saw me for a moment.
Then the woman looked up, and she was not at all surprised.
"You must be Kaitlyn," she said. She raised my glass at me. "He talks about you all the time."
Glen turned his head. His smile went away fast.
"Kaitlyn. Hey. Don't do that face."
He climbed out and the water ran off him onto the cedar. He reached for a towel from the rack.
I didn't wait for him to finish drying off. I turned around and went back into the kitchen.
I heard him behind me, his wet feet slapping the tile.
"Kaitlyn. Come on. Stop."
"That's my bottle," I said.
"It's just wine."
"It's my father's wine. It's the last one he gave me."
He looked at the bottle through the glass door. He seemed to understand for the first time that it mattered.
"I didn't know that," he said. "I'm sorry. I'll buy you another case."
"You can't buy that case."
He took a breath and lowered his voice, which is what he does when he wants a room to calm down.
"Mindy's flight got canceled this afternoon. She had nowhere to dry off and warm up. I figured an hour in the tub, then I'd drive her to a hotel. That's all this is."
I had known his ex-wife's name for two years and eight months.
I had never seen her face. There was not one photograph of her anywhere in our house.
"I texted you," Glen said.
"When?"
"An hour ago. I left my phone in the office, I'm sorry, I couldn't have shown you."
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and held it up between us.
My screen showed a text from my coworker about a Saturday shift, and nothing else.
"There's no text," I said.
"Then it didn't send. You know how the signal is out here."
I live in Spokane, six minutes from a Costco. The signal is not the issue.
"How long have you been out there?"
"Kaitlyn."
"How long, Glen?"
He turned the watch on his wrist. He does that when he adds to a number.
"Forty minutes. Fifty. I wasn't counting."
Behind him the glass door slid open, and Mindy stepped inside with the towel around her shoulders and my glass still in her hand.
"Don't blame him," she said. "He was very sweet about it. I'd have made him get out sooner if I'd known you'd be this upset."
She laughed again, and this time I saw it, the back of her wrist against her lips.
I do exactly that. My father did too. Every teacher I ever had asked me to stop.
I did not stop to think about it. I took the glass out of her hand, set it in the sink, and picked up the bottle from the deck.
There was an inch of wine left in it.
I poured it down the drain so she could not finish it.
"Kaitlyn, don't be dramatic," Glen said.
"I'm not being dramatic," I said. "I'm being efficient."
I took my keys off the hook.
"So I'm leaving."
I walked out the front door with the empty bottle in my hand.
The porch light was on. A truck sat at the curb with its tailgate down and a stack of split firewood in the bed.
Gabe stood at the foot of the porch steps. Glen's younger brother, thirty-six, the finish carpenter who had built the deck I'd just left.
He looked at the bottle, and then at me.
"I was on the side path when you came in," he said. "I heard all of it."
"Great."
"Kaitlyn." He kept his voice quiet. "Don't believe the flight thing."
"I don't."
"No. You don't understand." He looked back at the house, and then at me again. "Glen invited her here. I was in the kitchen on Tuesday when he called her. He said Saturday, because you'd be on shift late."
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