The Choices We Made novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Her Terms

Weston came up her mother's porch steps at dusk with nothing in his hands.

Eliza stood behind the screen door with a dish towel over her shoulder.

"I told you not to come," she said.

"Albie called me."

"I know. I held the phone."

"He said the creek has frogs and he wants to show me."

"He does."

"I won't stay if you tell me to go."

She looked at him through the mesh.

He wore the same gray coat he had worn to the hearing. He was unshaven, and he had not brought a bag.

"There was a letter from the district attorney," he said. "I'm going to plead. Eighteen months, probably, suspended, and a thousand hours of service, and a felony on my name. The judge hasn't ruled."

"You came to tell me that."

"I came so you'd hear it from me and not from a reporter. I'm not asking you to wait for anything."

She opened the screen door.

"Come in. He's been asking for you since breakfast."

Albie met him in the kitchen with a jar of tadpoles and a plan for the whole weekend.

He took Weston down to the creek in the last light, with his rubber boots on the wrong feet.

She watched from the back step as the two of them crouched at the bank with their heads together.

She watched her husband laugh at something, short and startled, and realized she had not heard him do it in six years.

At nine, Albie fell asleep in her mother's old sewing room with a tadpole jar on the nightstand.

Eliza stood in the hall with her arms crossed.

Weston stood a careful distance from her, in the kitchen doorway.

"Say the date," she said.

He went still.

"The day I asked you, in our bedroom. The day our baby died. I asked you twice."

"I know."

"You couldn't say it."

"March third," Weston said.

"Say the rest."

"He was born at ten minutes to midnight, three pounds two ounces. He cried before the cord was cut. The doctor wrote it on the back of a receipt, and I've read it forty times."

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