Now I Watch Her Love Him novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Costly

My father shut the office door and did not sit down.

He stood at the window with his back to me and looked out at the lot.

"Say it," he said. "All of it. I've been in this business forty years and I know what a man sounds like when he's holding back a number."

I had promised Hannah the truth with people watching.

My father was the only person in the building I could stand to say it in front of.

"I've been sleeping with Bailey Corrigan for twenty-two months," I said.

His shoulders did not move.

"Since January two years ago. At her apartment in Kettering, and at a hotel on Dorothy Lane on Tuesdays. I told Hannah four months last week. I lied about that too."

"Go on."

"The night of March ninth, I told her I was at a dealer meeting in Cleveland and my phone had died."

My father turned around.

"I wasn't in Cleveland. I was at Bailey's. My phone was charging in her bedroom, and I slept through it. Beth called me at seven in the morning."

I made myself finish.

"By then Wren was already gone."

He said nothing for a long time.

I had seen my father grieve once, at my mother's funeral, and it had looked nothing like this.

This was quiet, and it moved through his whole body.

"You let your wife go through that alone," he said.

"I didn't know. I swear to God, I didn't know until Beth called."

"That's not an excuse. That's the charge."

"I know."

He crossed the office furiously, and for a second I thought he would hit me.

He brought his fist down on the walnut desk instead, hard enough to make his coffee jump.

"Do you know what your mother said to me the day she died?" he said. "She said, Russell, Dylan thinks the world is a car he can trade in. Make him learn that it isn't."

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