My Brother Left Me With the Man He Told Me to Stay Away From, and Then Didn't Come Back novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The Books

Laz's POV

The real books were in a steel cabinet in the cold-storage warehouse.

They sat behind a stack of empty fish crates, where they had been kept since my father's time.

I opened it at four in the morning, alone, with the compressors thudding in the walls.

I had not meant to.

I had meant to sleep.

Then Nikos's burner had pinged a tower in Fort Lauderdale instead of Port Everglades, and I had driven to the warehouse with my jaw set.

I sat down at the steel desk under one bare bulb and read two years of Sundays.

I read them the way I read everything, once through for the whole and once for each line.

It took me ninety minutes.

When I was finished, I put both my hands flat on the desk and looked at them.

They were not quite steady.

Nine hundred thousand dollars, near enough.

It had gone out of the fish house in nine-thousand and fourteen-thousand-dollar pieces, through a supplier account that had never existed.

It had landed in a bank whose name Nikos had spelled wrong on purpose.

Every entry was in Nikos's hand.

Every one was dated a Sunday.

I had been at the kafeneio table on most of those Sundays.

I had passed Nikos the bread.

I had known him since we were nine.

That was the day a boy with a bloody knee pulled me out of the Anclote when the current took my legs.

Nikos had been the one person at that table who had never once looked at me as the family's heir.

He had looked at me as a friend.

I closed my eyes.

I thought of a man in a kitchen, kissing his sister's head, saying, Eat something.

I thought of the same man standing in this warehouse three weeks ago.

Nikos had asked in a light voice whether I could look after Thalia if anything ever happened to me.

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