While He Built Her Home novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Ex-Husband

Neil Foley worked the counter at a tool rental yard on the east side.

Clayton knew him from the lumber trade, and on Thursday morning he drove me there himself.

"I'll wait in the truck if you'd rather," he said at the gate.

"Come in."

"I don't know him well. I know he's the one who left that house with two suitcases and a lamp."

"Come in anyway."

Neil was thirty-five and thin, with a gray work shirt and a name patch on the pocket.

He looked up from a ledger and saw me, and the color went out of his face.

"You're Valerie," he said.

"We've met."

"At my wedding. You gave the toast." He wiped his hands on a rag. "Is Brynn okay?"

"She's fine. I need ten minutes."

He took us around the back to a bench beside a stack of ladders.

I set the bottle on the bench.

"Do you know what that is?"

He read the label. He read it a second time.

He sat down.

"That's her pharmacy."

"Yes."

"That's her name."

"Yes."

"What are they?"

I told him.

I told him the nurse's words and the four years and the two bottles a month.

I did it in the order it had happened, in plain sentences, with my voice level.

When I finished he was looking at his hands.

"She told me I couldn't have kids," he said.

Clayton shifted behind me.

"For five years," Neil said. "She cried about it every month."

"What did she say?"

"She'd sit on the edge of the tub and say it didn't matter, she loved me anyway."

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