My Brother Left Me With the Man He Told Me to Stay Away From, and Then Didn't Come Back novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: Morning Light
Laz's POV
I woke at five to an empty bed and a pencil scratching.
The window over the iron bed had gone gray.
Thalia stood in front of it in my white shirt, barefoot, with a yellow legal pad against her forearm and one of the old fish-house receipts held up to the light.
She did not hear me wake.
I lay still and watched her.
She had been at it since yesterday afternoon, with a short stop for sleep.
Nine boxes sat open around the room, and the floor was a field of pink and white slips in piles she had sorted by year.
Twenty years of my uncle's handwriting lay out on the boards of my cottage, and she had added every one.
I had told her all of it the night before, the boat and the lease and the lie.
She had listened to every word without moving her face.
Then she had said, in the quiet voice, "You were going to sell your father's boat to keep me from reading a spreadsheet."
"Yes."
"That's the most insulting thing a man has ever done for me," she had said.
"I know."
"Don't ever do it again."
I had not slept well after.
It was not the telling that cost me.
It was the room it left, an empty place where the lie had been, where I had nothing to stand behind.
She had her pencil in her teeth now, and she was counting under her breath.
I had never seen a woman look so completely like herself.
"You're awake," she said, without turning.
"Yes."
"Seven hundred and four."
"What?" I said.
"Receipts.
"In his hand, since 2004.
"Every one of them says paid to a supplier that doesn't ship fish.
"It comes to four million, two hundred thousand dollars, give or take."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Brother Left Me With the Man He Told Me to Stay Away From, and Then Didn't Come Back are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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