He Told Me I Lost Our Baby, and Five Years Later I Met Him at His Door novel · Chapter 18 of 24
Chapter 18: What He Signed
Cormac's POV
I took the sign down myself.
It was a Monday morning in the middle of November, with the avenue still wet from the night and a bakery van double-parked at the door.
SHANAHAN'S, it said, in gold letters on black over the awning.
My father had paid a man from Southie to paint it forty-one years ago.
I stood on a borrowed ladder in my shirtsleeves with a screwdriver in my teeth and my bandaged hand throbbing.
I took out the first of the eight bolts.
A crowd had gathered on the pavement by the time I reached the fifth.
They were men I had known all my life.
Some of them held their caps and some held coffee, and none of them said a word.
I had thought for a week about what I was allowed to give up.
Siobhan had told me on the porch in Quincy that I could not choose how I paid, and she was right.
I could not hand her the buildings and call it atonement.
That was a price I had set myself, and she had refused it.
But the chair was mine, and so was the bar, and so was the name over the door.
I had held them for eight years.
I had sat in the Landlord's seat in the back room every Sunday and decided what thirty people owed me.
I could put that down.
It was not a gift to her, and it bought nothing.
It was the one piece of my life I could stop holding over other people.
The Thursday before the notice went up, I had signed the bar over to the manager who had run it for six years.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Told Me I Lost Our Baby, and Five Years Later I Met Him at His Door are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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