Chapter 11: One Phone Call

I came down the stairs with the curtain's dust still on my hand, and I did not stop at the bottom.

"Tell me now," I said. "All of it. I don't care about rule four."

Rafe stood in the gravel with his hands open.

"You should sit."

"I'll stand."

"Annie."

"Tell me why Boone thinks Dayton will make me hate you."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he sat down on the bottom step.

I stayed standing, and I kept both hands on my belly.

"It was a Thursday in October," he said. "I was on a job in Zanesville."

He rubbed his eyebrow.

"My phone rang at nine at night."

"Boone."

"He said it was a favor. He said you'd come to his mother's kitchen, crying, and you'd asked him to call me because you couldn't."

My lips had gone numb.

"I said, call me about what? And he said you'd picked him."

"I never..."

"I know." He pressed on. "He said you'd been seeing him for two months."

"That's not..."

"He said you were scared to tell me, because I'd lose my temper. He said you wanted a clean break, and I wasn't to come by or call."

Something cold slid down the back of my neck.

"I said no, put her on the phone. He said she's sitting right here, and she can't talk to you."

"I wasn't there," I said. "I was home, in my father's house on Cutler Street, painting the porch."

"I know that now."

"Then why did you believe him?"

"Because he was my best friend," Rafe said simply. "I'd never once heard him lie to me."

He looked at the gravel.

"And part of me thought, why would she want me? I was twenty-four and I had four hundred dollars and a truck."

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