He Erased Me From The Photo I Erased Him From My Life Chapter 10
Just before five on Friday, Naomi poked her head over the partition between our desks.
“There’s a concert at Red Rocks this weekend. I bought an extra ticket by mistake. Want to go?”
“Yes.”
She immediately forwarded me the e-ticket and made plans to meet downstairs on Saturday evening.
That night, back at my apartment, I started cleaning up my laptop’s hard drive. In a folder on the desktop were the photos I’d brought from Chicago: us at Montrose Harbor, our engagement dinner, Owen with his arm around me, both of us smiling.
I selected them all. I didn’t delete them. I just dragged them into a new folder and labeled it “Z_Archive.”
The past had happened.
It just didn’t need to be in plain sight anymore.
When the progress bar finished, I closed the laptop.
At that same moment, in Chicago—
Owen met Sloane at a coffee shop. He skipped the pleasantries.
“Did you tear up Natalie’s mother’s property papers on purpose?”
Sloane went pale, tears instantly welling in her eyes. “Of course not. I spilled my coffee, and when I tried to clean it up, the papers ripped. How could you even suspect me of that?”
As she spoke, she nervously twisted the wedding ring Cal had given her.
Owen watched the gesture and fell silent.
They had known each other for over twenty years. Every time Sloane lied, she fiddled with that ring, as if borrowing her dead husband’s memory to vouch for her.
She kept talking, her voice growing more and more aggrieved. But for the first time, Owen didn’t try to comfort her. The certainty in his eyes slowly curdled into disgust.
He rose to his feet and said only one thing.
“I understand now.”