My Husband Never Took Me on Trips with His Friends. Then I Saw a Video of Him Kissing Another Woman novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Plans Change

"Then tell me what it is you're afraid of," I said.

Thatcher stood very still by the stacked chairs with his hands at his sides.

Outside the front window, snow had started falling past the streetlight.

He took a chair from the stack and turned it so it faced the back wall, and then he sat on it.

I took the one beside him.

We were looking at the pencil outline of the window seat.

"I was engaged," he said. "Six years ago. We were going to open this place together."

"What happened?"

"We found the space on a Tuesday. We signed the lease the following Friday. She left on the Thursday between."

I waited.

"She had a job offer in Seattle. She'd been sitting on it for a month, and she told me the night before she took it." He rubbed his thumb along the edge of his palm. "She said she'd stay if I asked. She stood in the hallway of our apartment with a bag on her shoulder and waited."

"And you didn't ask."

"I said, 'Drive safe.'"

He said it flatly, to the wall.

"I told myself I was being decent. A man who asks a woman to give up the thing she wants isn't a good man, and I'd rather be a good one." He shook his head once. "That was a lie, too. I was scared she'd say yes and then spend ten years being sorry about it."

"So you let her go."

"I signed the lease alone. I drew the window seat for two the same week, and I've never built it." His mouth turned up at one side, and it didn't last. "I look at it every morning."

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