He Caged Me for Fifteen Years novel · Chapter 12 of 24
Chapter 12: Wolf's Hand
I did not say a word to Fergus.
I stood in the yard in Niall's shirt with my fists closed and watched him fold the paper and tuck it in his shirt pocket.
"Keep her," he said again, softly, as if tasting it.
He looked pleased in a way I had never seen on a man's face.
He went inside, and the old men gathered on the porch to hear it.
I turned and walked away.
Niall caught up with me at the barn door.
"Maeve."
"Don't."
"It might mean something else."
"It means what it says."
"Your father could mean something else."
"Don't tell me what my father could be."
I went back to the box room and sat on the bed.
I stared at the broken glass he had swept from the next room, at the hole in the plaster, and at my own hands.
By midnight I had made up my mind.
If my father had written a letter, there was a letter.
If there was a letter, Fergus Caffrey would keep it.
He was a man who counted fifteen years on a wall and lived in a house with a cage in the cellar.
He would not throw away a piece of paper.
I waited until the old men's snoring came up through the floorboards. Then I took the ground spoon handle from under my mattress and crept down the stairs in my bare feet.
The study was at the back of the house.
The door gave, because nothing in that house was locked.
I did not turn on the lamp. The moon through the window was enough.
The desk was a big, scarred oak thing with three drawers down the right side.
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