In the orange light, he looked suddenly small, a man in a good shirt on the wrong side of a door.
“You’d never leave,” he said, and he said it like a discovery, like someone trying a key he’d always assumed fit. “Laura. You’ve got nothing without me. We’re a team. You can’t run that house on your own.”
I almost smiled.
“Carl,” I said. “I’ve been running that house on my own for fifteen years. You just lived in it.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Well, Carl.” I looked at him for a long moment, at the face I had loved since I was twenty-three. “What did you expect?”
David rose from the curb, slowly, and stood at my shoulder without saying a word.
That was all he did.
He just stood there, an old man with a bad knee and a crooked little finger, and for the first time in my life, I had someone beside me who was not asking me to carry something.
