Dominated by My Dad's Boss novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: Stay

"You're not sleeping in that apartment again," Torin said.

We were standing in the foundry lot at midnight with the safe still open upstairs and the tag in my fist.

"You don't get to order me out of my own home."

"I'm not ordering you as your teacher."

"Then as who?"

"As a man who would never forgive himself if something happened to you."

That stopped me.

His voice had gone rough on the last word.

"Eight days, Bronwyn. Somebody walked into a locked office while three hundred people cheered next door."

"Somebody tied a ribbon to your door."

"I'm not going to hide."

"Then don't hide. Sleep in my house, take your own car in the morning, go to work, and go wherever you want."

"With a lock you can't pick?"

"With a lock I installed myself."

I looked at him for a long moment under the sodium light.

"Fine," I said. "Under one condition."

"Name it."

"I cook."

His mouth twitched.

"You can't possibly want to cook."

"I've seen your kitchen. You own one pan."

"It's a good pan."

By one in the morning I stood barefoot on a cold stone floor in his Lakewood kitchen.

I wore one of his shirts and fried eggs in the one good pan.

The windows looked down a long dark lawn to the lake.

He sat on a stool at the island with his glasses off, watching me work.

"My father drank," he said, out of nowhere.

I turned the eggs.

"He left when I was seventeen. Took the car and the TV and my mother's ring. I found a job washing dishes at a hotel and slept on a friend's floor. I was good with numbers, and that was all I was good at."

"And Gus?"

"I was nineteen and working the front desk. He was a guest. He saw me fix a billing error that would have cost the hotel four thousand dollars. He asked me what I wanted to do with my life."

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