He Sat Me by the Warming Racks, So I Pulled the Funding novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Seat

Maureen's POV

I read Anne Hendry's letters at my mother's kitchen table, with a man I barely knew sitting across from me and my tea going cold.

The first one was dated three weeks after I left school.

It was typed on the college's cream paper, and it was short.

"Dear Ms. Tolbert, the faculty is aware of your mother's illness. Your place in the final semester will be held for you. Please call my office when you are able."

I had never seen it.

I had never been told it existed.

On the day I walked out of the nursing building, I had believed with my whole body that I was walking out for good.

Nobody had told me I could come back.

I turned the page.

The second letter was six months later and the third a year after that.

There was a form attached to each one, folded in thirds, and a postage-paid envelope.

On the bottom of the form was a line to sign, and the line had been signed.

It said, in blue ink, "Ms. Tolbert declines with thanks. She is happily settled and asks not to be contacted. C. Ainsley, on her behalf."

I stopped reading.

I read it again.

The handwriting was neat and sloped to the right.

It was Curtis's hand, the same hand that signed every birthday card he had ever given me.

"He signed for me," I said.

Lowell did not say anything.

"He wasn't my husband yet. He was my boyfriend, and then he was my fiancé, and then he was my husband. And every time she wrote, he wrote back for me."

I turned to the fourth, the fifth, the sixth.

In the fifth, there was a second signature below his, a looping one I knew from my own wedding invitations.

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