Now I Watch Her Love Him novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: The Armrest

Jonas drove with both hands on the wheel and said nothing for the whole drive.

His truck smelled of sawdust and of the thermos on the dash.

I sat with my hands on my knees and watched Dayton go gray past the window.

It was a Thursday in the third week of January, and Hannah's car was not at the hospital when we pulled in.

"She isn't coming," Jonas said. "She told Beth she'd give you the hour."

"Why?"

"You'd have to ask her."

We walked down the gravel path to the garden.

The benches were dusted with old snow.

Wren's was at the far end, under a bare maple, and Jonas brushed the seat with his glove before he sat.

He did not tell me to sit.

I stood a while looking at the plate, and then I sat at the other end, with the whole length of the oak between us.

"Four years ago in October," Jonas said, "my wife went to bed with a headache."

I turned my head.

"She was thirty-one. She said she'd take an aspirin and lie down, and I went out to the shop to finish a table." He looked straight ahead. "I came in at eleven and she was on the floor of the bathroom."

I said nothing.

"The doctors said it was a stroke. They said there was no warning. They said that if I'd been in the house, it would have changed nothing, and they said it kindly, more than once."

"It wouldn't have," I said.

"I know it wouldn't." He turned a glove over in his hand. "I was thirty feet away, in a building I own, planing a tabletop. I've sat on the other end of that for four years."

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