I Stripped to Keep My Boyfriend in School, and He Sold Me to the Man My Brother Died Owing novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Ask Me Anything Else

"The boat shed," I said.

"Yes," Toby said.

"Tell me what's in the boat shed," I said.

"I can't tell you that," he said. "I can tell you it isn't mine, and it isn't Lars's, and it isn't what you think."

"That's what you said about the cellar."

"And I was telling the truth," Toby said.

I let go of his wrists and sat back on my heels on the library rug.

The fire popped.

He sat with his shirt rucked up and his jeans undone, wrecked and open, and did not pretend otherwise.

I had known him four years once, as a face at the edge of my brother's life.

I had known him eight days as a man.

I looked at him and tried to decide what I was allowed to ask a man who had just let me do that to him.

"Then I'll ask the one question I haven't," I said.

"Ask."

"Did you bury my brother?"

He had been expecting something else.

I saw it hit him.

All the color went out of his face, and then slowly came back, and his hands closed on his knees.

"Iris," he said.

"You carried the box. I watched you. You wouldn't let the pallbearers touch it. You wouldn't let the priest lift the lid. You stood at the grave with your hand flat on the wood until they lowered it, and I thought, that's love."

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