Chapter 10: The Old Binders

Shane's POV

The process server put the papers in her hand.

She read the first page standing in the parking lot.

I watched her mouth go thin.

"A protective order," she said. "He's asking a judge to keep me five hundred feet from him and Melanie. For harassment."

"The hearing's in ten days."

"I know how to read a date."

She folded the papers once and put them in her back pocket.

Then she looked at me, and her eyes were wet and furious, and she smiled.

I have fallen off a second-story deck, and I have never been so scared of anything as that smile.

"Take me to Annette's," she said. "I have a hearing to win."

I drove her there.

I did not say a word the whole way, because every word I had was the wrong one.

I carried her bouquet down that aisle.

I have said it to myself every night since, in the dark of the trailer.

I did it because Dalton's father was twenty feet away and I had been on his payroll for eleven years.

I did it because he had paid for my trade school and I felt I owed him.

I told myself that if I said no, she would be humiliated worse, with me as the one who made the scene.

None of it was a reason.

She had stood at the foot of the aisle with her hair torn loose.

I had put her flowers in another woman's hands.

I had looked at the grass.

I could not look at her, because I knew exactly what I'd see.

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