He Thought I'd Forget novel · Chapter 8 of 32

Chapter 8: The Tin

I didn't take Byron's car home.

I carried Davey down nine floors of stairs and called the only number I'd saved in my phone that wasn't my husband's.

Clark picked up on the first ring.

"Where are you?"

"The hospital. Outside the gift shop. Can you..."

"Twelve minutes," he said. "Don't go anywhere."

He made it in ten.

He had sawdust in his beard and the formula tin on the passenger seat.

"I brought the freezer bag too," he said. "In a cooler. Is that weird? It felt weird."

"It's perfect."

He looked at my face while I buckled Davey in.

"What happened up there?"

"He told a room full of doctors I'm his miracle. Then he filed to take my son."

Clark's hands went tight on the wheel.

He didn't say anything.

He just drove to Bellevue a lot faster than the night before.

Jeanine's salon was four blocks from her house.

It had a pink door and a hand-painted sign that was peeling at the corners.

Inside, five women looked up from five chairs.

One had foils in. One was under a dryer. One was a teenager getting bangs.

Jeanine dropped her scissors on the floor.

"Lee!"

She crossed the room in three steps and hugged me with Davey squashed between us.

Then she pulled back and pointed at Clark.

"You. I said you'd lose your hair if anything happened to her."

"She's fine," Clark said. "Nothing happened. I have very nice hair."

"He's cute," said the woman under the dryer, too loudly.

"He's the neighbor," Jeanine said.

"I'd let him be my neighbor."

Clark turned red to the tips of his ears and studied a shelf of shampoo.

Jeanine marched me to the chair with the foils.

The woman in it was about seventy, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a legal pad on her lap.

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