chapter 9
I didn’t give him the address. It didn’t matter. We had too many mutuals for an address to stay quiet.
I saw him through the peephole: hair neat, jaw clenched, the kind of angry hands that want an audience.
When I opened the door, he stopped, caught in a script without the first line.
“Daniel,” I said.
“You blocked me on everything,” he said. “It made this difficult.”
“That was the point.”
He inhaled. “Chloe, you humiliated me. In front of everyone. You made me look—” He searched for a word that wasn’t “small.”
“I poured wine on your head because you called me petty for objecting to you taking wedding photos with another woman.”
“Ashley is ill.”
“I know her condition,” I said. “I also know mine.”
He stared at my wall where the paint was still a little uneven. “You think I chose her over you.”
“I think you practiced choosing her so often it became muscle memory.”
“I proposed to you,” he said, like that was a trump card. “I saved for years. I planned our life.”
“You planned a wedding you didn’t believe in and an afterlife where you never had to be the bad guy. Those aren’t the same.”
He flinched. He’d always believed me gentle. He’d mistaken my gentleness for a lack of teeth.
“I’m here to apologize,” he said abruptly. “For the pendant. For the photos. It was thoughtless. I wanted to make Ashley happy. She said she always dreamed of a gown, and I—look, I didn’t understand how it would feel to you. I get that now. I’m sorry.”
He was so close to the truth.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m not coming back.”
He nodded once, hard. “You don’t even want to think about it?”
“I did nothing else for ten years.”
His eyes flicked to the photograph of my mother. “She liked me,” he said quietly, as if he could borrow her voice.
“She liked who I was when I believed you would protect me.”
He looked down. “Ashley’s in the hospital,” he said finally, defeated. “You told them about the codeine.”
“It was the right thing.”
He swallowed. “She keeps asking for you.”
“I know,” I said. “She always did.”