From the Don's Son's Plus-Size Girl to His Brother's Claim novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Fat Chance

I didn't ask him in the house.

I waited until we were in the car, past the gate, on the dark road with the big bare trees going by.

"Your brother says you used to sleep behind my deli."

Killian's hands went tight on the wheel.

He didn't say anything for a whole block.

"That's the later," he said finally.

"The later from the lake."

"Yes."

"You said one later, Killian. Not two."

"It's the same one." He pulled over under a streetlight and put the car in park, and turned to look at me. "I'm not going to lie to you. I'm asking you for till Thursday."

"Why Thursday?"

"Because I don't want to tell you in a car." He swallowed. "I want to show you. And I want to do it right. I've thought about how for five years."

Five years.

Since he came home.

I looked at his face in the streetlight, and I thought about every message he'd ever sent me. Every single one had been the truth, even the ones where he let me call him by the wrong name.

"Thursday," I said.

His expression softened.

"Thursday."

On Tuesday, the deli opened again.

The orange sign was gone. The line came back.

I lasted until Wednesday.

At five on Wednesday morning, I came downstairs in my walking clothes and turned on the lights in the front, and stopped.

The front window was covered.

Somebody had taped up a dozen sheets of printer paper, all the same picture.

Me last spring. The flannel shirt, the zeppole, the big laughing face.

Across all of them, in fat pink spray paint, right over my face on the glass:

FAT CHANCE.

The paint had dripped.

I stood there in my sneakers looking at it for a long time.

Then I went into the back office and pulled up the camera.

My father had put it in after a break-in, and my mother never looked at it.

I scrolled back to three in the morning.

A white SUV pulled up at the curb at three twelve.

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