One Night Stand novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Rain

"My website has a picture of that camera," I said. "With the tape on the grip."

"Does it?" Preston smiled.

"It's in the About page."

"There you are, then. I read everything."

He ruffled Otto's curls and left, and I stood in the hall and told myself the same sentence three times.

My website had a picture of the camera.

Eleanor, in the doorway of the sunroom, was watching the front door close.

She did not say anything.

She went back to her tea.

On Sunday the press moved off the street, because a senator had been arrested for something more interesting.

Mateo came down to breakfast in a sweater.

"There's a garden behind the house," he said. "Nobody can see it from the road."

"Is that an invitation?"

"It's a fact about the garden."

Otto, on my lap, looked up from his pancake.

"Can Rex come?"

"Rex is very welcome," Mateo said.

So we went.

The path ran through old beeches and down to a stone wall with a wooden gate.

Otto walked ahead with his dinosaur held over his head, narrating a battle.

Mateo walked beside me with his hands in his pockets.

"I don't know how to do this," he said quietly.

"Do what?"

"Be somebody's father. I read three books this week."

"Which three?"

"I'm not telling you which three."

I laughed again.

I was doing that more often, and it worried me.

"He doesn't want a book," I said. "He wants you to be there when he finds a stick."

"That's all?"

"Mostly."

Otto found a stick.

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