Phoenix Of Ruin: My Second Life Comes With A Better Man novel · Chapter 18 of 24
Chapter 18: The Gray Boat
Jonas Hartwell sat across from her in his own study at three in the morning and could not make his hands lie flat.
The police had taken the masked man and his two friends.
Howard had taken his driver home in the back of Conroy's car, and the house had gone quiet around them.
Leigh sat in the leather chair by the window with a blanket around her shoulders and the rope burns on her wrists dressed in white gauze.
She had not touched the tea he'd put in front of her.
"Tell me," she said.
He had planned this for three weeks, in a hundred sentences, and now every one of them was gone.
"I was there," he said. "On the shore. The day they threw you in."
She did not move.
"I wore this coat. I was running, and I was too late."
Her eyes went to the gray wool over the back of his chair, then back to his face.
"The man in the fog," she said.
"Yes."
"I saw you running." Her voice was very small. "Right before the water. I didn't know who you were."
"I know. I was nobody to you."
He made himself keep going.
"I had watched you for six years, Leigh. Not close. I never spoke to you."
"Why?"
"I saw you once, at a charity auction, the winter you turned twenty-four. You were laughing at something and you forgot to hold your glass right, and it spilled on a senator."
She almost smiled.
"You were already engaged to Pemberton," he said. "I told myself that was the end of it."
"It wasn't."
"I sat in the back at every event your husband dragged you to. I knew your tea. I knew you were allergic to lilies because I watched you sneeze through a wedding. I knew you hated the water because you never went near the harbor, even when you were thirty and everyone else went."
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