I Kissed a Stranger to Spite My Cheating Boyfriend, and Monday He Was the Professor With a Rule Against Me novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Unmarking

I went into the water at nine that night, from the rocks below faculty row, with my father standing on the seawall above me.

He had come over on the afternoon ferry in his good wool coat, with my mother, who held a covered dish and had refused to put it down.

The Marit was safe.

My father told me how in the kitchen, in four sentences, with his hat in his hands.

Then he looked at Elias for a long moment.

"Doctor," my father said.

"Captain," Elias said.

"You'll want to eat something before you go in," my mother said.

"It's lefse."

I cried, at last.

I cried standing in a kitchen in my socks, with a plate of my mother's lefse in my hands.

Nobody said a word.

Now it was dark and cold, and the stars were out.

The tide was high and still.

Freya sat on the rocks below the seawall in her rescue-squad fleece with a thermos.

She had said somebody had to be on shore with a blanket, and that it was her.

Elias stood beside me at the water's edge in his jeans, with his shirt off and his hands at his sides.

I held out my left wrist to the starlight.

The mark lay black on it, a spiral drawn inward with a hook at the end like a gull's wing.

I had worn it for a year and a half.

I had hidden it and cursed it and wept on it.

In the last week it had become the thing that told me who had loved me first.

"I'm not angry at it," I said.

"No," Elias said.

"I thought I would be," I said.

"I thought I'd stand here and want it gone."

I looked at the mark.

"But I don't.

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