He Bought My Father's Name to Make Me Kneel, but I Was the One Who Cut His Chains novel · Chapter 14 of 24
Chapter 14: The Apology
Erlend's POV
I sat up all that day in the counting house, with the Isbister ledger shut on the desk.
I did not read it.
I looked at the place where the cut ran down the spine between two hundred and eleven and two hundred and thirteen, and I thought of her thumb on it, and of her saying nothing for ten years, and of my saying nothing back.
I had been wrong about everything that mattered.
I had been wrong in a straight line for twenty years, with my brother's hand on my shoulder, pointing.
I did not know how to put it into words, so I wrote it.
I wrote it six times and burned five.
The sixth was four lines, and I sent it by the groom.
Then I went down to the pier and stood there until I heard the trap.
She came along the shore road at a walk, with her shawl up and her father's pony slow on the stones.
She tied him at the rail and came down the planks.
She stopped three yards off.
She had not slept either.
"You said you had something to say," she said.
"I have."
"Then say it."
I had practised it.
It went out of my head like water out of a bucket.
"I put you in my house for a year and a day," I said. "I put a bond on you in front of a shop full of people. I took your name for what was written in a book by a man I had never asked."
"Yes."
"I'd have used every debt on the Ness against you. I thought I would enjoy it."
"Did you?" she asked.
"No."
"You said you'd not use it to keep me in a room."
"I said it, and I meant it. But I had it, Danika. I had the whole book in a leather case, and I put it on your counter, and I watched your face." My throat shut. "I'm ashamed of that more than of the rest."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Bought My Father's Name to Make Me Kneel, but I Was the One Who Cut His Chains are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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