He Left at 2 AM for Her Tampons, So I Left for Kenya novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Fifty Minutes of Dust

Alec's POV

The road to Kisumu is fifty minutes of red dust and potholes, and Marissa Doyle did not say a word for the first thirty.

She sat in the passenger seat with her handbag on her knees and looked straight ahead.

I had put her suitcase in the cab with us, because I was not going to let a woman ride in the back with the oil drums, whatever she had done.

I didn't like that I'd made that decision, and I liked it less that I'd made it for myself.

"You've been very kind," she said at last.

"I'm driving a truck."

"You've been kind to her. You've kept an eye on her for three years." She turned her head. "She doesn't know, does she? How long."

I kept my eyes on the road.

"She thinks you hired her for her hands," Marissa said. "But you printed a second contract on her first day. Wanjiru's niece told Clayton. The whole village tells him everything."

"Wanjiru's niece should mind her cake."

"Rosemary walked out on a man who adored her, Dr. Reeve, because the first hard night came and she decided to be alone. She didn't tell him. She didn't ask him to stay. She just left." Her voice was gentle again. "She'll do that to you. The first time you let her down, she'll be gone before you know it."

It was a good shot.

It went through the middle of something I had been careful not to look at for three years.

I let a mile of dust go by.

"Two things," I said.

"Go on."

"The first is that she did tell him. She told him yesterday, in front of sixty people, and she told it better than anybody I've heard."

Marissa said nothing.

"The second is that she lay on a bathroom floor alone while the man she married drove across town to you. That wasn't a choice she made. You made it for her."

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