I Stripped to Keep My Boyfriend in School, and He Sold Me to the Man My Brother Died Owing novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: The Bill
"Brett," I said.
He stopped in the middle of the church parking lot between two snowbanks, and did not turn.
I walked across the ice until I was ten feet from him.
"I wasn't going to talk to you," he said.
"I know. You were going to leave."
"I came to say I'm sorry."
"You came to see whether I'd been told," I said.
He turned around.
He had been crying again.
His gelled hair had gone flat, and his good fleece was stained at the cuff.
"Told what?" he said.
"About Lars," I said.
"What about him?" Brett said.
"He put the debt on you, Brett. Six months ago. It was never your gambling. It was his bait."
His mouth opened.
I watched it cross his face as plain as a rash, and I saw that he was not surprised.
"You knew," I said.
"No," Brett said.
"You knew it was set up."
"I thought," Brett said. "I mean, I didn't know. There was a guy at the book. He kept letting me run it up. He kept saying, it's fine, Kallio, you're good for it, everyone knows who you're dating."
"Who you were dating," I said.
"I thought he liked me," Brett said.
"He liked what I paid for."
"I didn't want to look," he said.
"No," I said. "You looked in the mirror."
He started to cry, and I let him.
I took a folded sheet of paper out of my coat pocket.
I had written it at my mother's kitchen table the night before, with a ballpoint and a calculator.
It was in my plain nurse's handwriting.
I held it out.
"What is that?" Brett said.
"Your bill."
"Iris."
"Twenty-four months of rent, eleven thousand six hundred," I said. "Your tuition, eight thousand four hundred. The car and insurance, three thousand. The gym, the watch, the haircuts. Twenty-three thousand dollars."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of I Stripped to Keep My Boyfriend in School, and He Sold Me to the Man My Brother Died Owing are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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