He Banned a Baby in Our Contract, Then Found His Daughter novel · Chapter 9 of 24
Chapter 9: The Stage
It was dark by half past four on the twenty-first of December, which counts as night.
My grandfather's fishing stage stood out over the water on spruce stilts.
It was a long grey shed with a plank floor and a door onto the wharf.
I had taken him there to show him the one place in Gannet Tickle he hadn't seen.
The splitting table ran down the middle of the room, scrubbed pale by sixty years of salt.
A single lantern hung from a beam.
Under our feet the sea moved against the pilings, slow and black.
Through the cracks in the floor I could see it shine.
"He cut cod here every summer until the moratorium," I told him. "Then he cut nothing, and he came here anyway and mended nets nobody needed."
"What did you do?"
"I sat on that table and did my homework."
Lorcan put his hand flat on the wood.
He looked around at the shelves of rusted tins, the coiled rope and the old rubber boots drying on their pegs.
"Tom would have liked this," he said.
It was the second time he had said his brother's name to me.
I didn't push.
"He'd have liked you," he said instead.
"Would he?"
"He liked anyone who answered back."
I laughed, and the lantern swung.
When I turned from it he was standing very close, and his eyes were on my mouth.
"Rule two," I said softly.
"Break it."
"Lorcan."
"I know the rule. I wrote it on the fridge myself." His hand came up and slid around my jaw. "It's night, I think, and I'm starting it. Tell me to stop."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Banned a Baby in Our Contract, Then Found His Daughter are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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