He Paid a Million for One Night, and the Contract Was Signed by My Mother novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: The Old Paper
Soren's POV
My grandmother received me in the front parlor with the blinds drawn against the afternoon.
She had been expecting me.
She sat in her wheelchair with the blue album open on her knees, and she did not ask how I was.
"Shut the door," Theodora said. "Sit where I can see you."
I sat.
I was thirty-nine years old and she was eighty-four, and she had taken me off a Baton Rouge dock at nine with a hand on my collar.
I had never in thirty years sat in that room without wanting her approval.
"You've been at the dock," she said. "You've let the girl hear it from her mother in front of forty captains."
"Odalys chose the day."
"She chose it because you let her." She lifted a pale hand. "Don't. I'm not scolding. I'm telling you I knew."
"Knew what, Grandmother?"
"About the seamstress," my grandmother said. "In 1996. I knew the whole summer."
I did not move.
"Cormac was thirty-five and bored, and Lenore was sick more than well, and there was a girl with pins in her mouth who looked at him as if he hung the moon. I watched it from this very room." She tapped the arm of the chair. "I could count. When Odalys left the river in September and I saw her at the christening in Thibodaux in the spring, I could count again."
"You never said."
"I never said," she said. "I was forty-something and had a house full of Verlanders. Josias said leave it. I left it."
Her voice was dry.
I understood she was not asking me to forgive her.
She was only putting it on the table.
"And I've lain awake with it for twenty-eight years," Theodora said. "I wasn't a good woman about that girl. I was a comfortable one."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Paid a Million for One Night, and the Contract Was Signed by My Mother are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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