He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me novel · Chapter 8 of 24
Chapter 8: Keep Your Hands Where You Put Them
Jo's POV
I found Nolan Cormier's trailer by the mailbox with the faded flag on it.
It sat at the end of a shell road three miles past our dock, under a live oak hung with Spanish moss.
I had been going there since I was six.
He had taught me to splice line and to read a cold front in the color of the water.
He had taught me to keep my mouth shut around my father.
That afternoon he sat on the step with a coffee can in his lap, and he did not get up.
"Jo," he said.
"Nolan," I said.
"I figured you'd come," he said.
"Then you know what I'm going to ask."
"I know," he said.
He turned the can in his hands.
The two fingers he'd lost to the Miss Beverly's winch were the first thing I ever saw of what the boats could do.
"Ask your mother," he said.
"My mother is dying in a bed."
"Not yours, honey."
My skin prickled.
"What does that mean?" I said.
"I've said more than I meant to." He looked up. "I told that boy this morning I owed him a thing. I do. It isn't mine to pay alone, and it isn't yours to carry either. Give me till Saturday."
"Saturday for what?"
"Till I can say it where it counts."
I wanted to climb the steps and take him by the collar.
He was sixty-six, and he had never once in my life lied to me.
I could see that he was frightened.
"Was it you?" I said. "That night? Did you help him?"
He did not answer.
He looked out at the oak and its moss and said nothing.
I understood that he had been holding this for sixteen years.
"Saturday," he said. "Go home, Jo."
I drove back across the Causeway with both hands tight on the wheel.
Cal was waiting in the yard.
He had come back early from the cold-storage yard, still in his suit.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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