My Daughter Is Dying, and My Husband Is Saving His Lover's Son novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: The Spare Key

"Calling you what?" I said. "A regular?"

"A regular comes in, buys a coconut cake, and goes home." Matt kept both forearms on the roof of the car. "I don't want to go home. I want to come home. To you two. In the mornings, after shift, up those three steps."

The garage light flickered over us.

In the back seat, Clara was snoring through her mask.

"You want a key," I said.

"I want a key."

I looked at him a long time.

Four months ago I'd sat on a landing and decided nobody would ever make me wait at a door again.

"I'm not doing anything fast," I said. "Not ever again."

"I know."

"Clara gets a vote."

"I'd expect nothing less. She'll want a clipboard."

"And the divorce has to be final first. On paper. Signed."

"Then I'll wait for the paper," he said. "I'm good at waiting. I used to do it for the Army."

The paper came on a Tuesday in August.

My lawyer sent it with one line: "Congratulations. Go bake."

Clara voted the same week, at the kitchen table, with the clipboard.

She asked him three new questions.

Would he still work nights? Yes, four a week.

Would he fix the drip in the bathtub? He'd already fixed it, on Sunday, while she was at her dad's visit.

Would he learn to do a lily? He'd try.

"Hired," she wrote at the bottom. "No probation."

He moved in on the first Saturday in October.

He didn't have much.

Four boxes of books, a toolbox, a duffel bag of scrubs, and a shoebox full of paper cranes from years of night shifts.

The dad with the toddler helped carry the boxes up the narrow stairs.

The toddler carried one crane, very seriously, all the way to the top.

I gave Matt his key at the kitchen table.

It was on a ring with a tiny pink enamel crown I'd found at a craft fair.

He turned it over in his fingers.

"It's very pink," he said.

"Everything here is pink."

"I'm aware. I've been aware since March."

Life got ordinary fast, and I loved it.

He came home at seven-thirty in the morning as I was opening the shop downstairs.

He kissed me over the register with his coat still on.

The bell on the drawer went off, and he only jumped a little now.

He took Clara to her clinic visits on his days off, once a month now instead of twice a week.

He taught her to fold cranes.

She taught him the lily.

It looked like a lily that had been in a fight, and she gave it a six.

On Saturdays, Brad was at the family center door ten minutes early, every single week.

He'd stopped wearing suits on Saturdays.

In September, we all went to Caden's first game as goalie.

He stood in the net with his hair down to his eyebrows, under a ball cap, in the biggest gloves on the field.

He saved four shots.

On the fourth one he looked straight at our row in the bleachers.

Clara was standing on the bench in her mask, screaming his name.

His grandmother cried into a thermos.

Clara's hair came in that fall too.

Soft at first, then curly, like it had been at four.

She made me measure it every Sunday with Caden's ruler.

On a Friday in late October, the first really cold night, she went to my mother's for a sleepover.

She took a bag of crowns and a list of jokes.

Matt was off.

I closed the shop at seven, flour on my jeans and a hole in the elbow of my sweatshirt.

When I came up the back stairs, he'd made dinner.

Spaghetti, which was the only thing he could cook, and a bag of peanut butter crackers on the table for dessert.

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