My Sister Ran Before the Wedding, So I Said I Do novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Twenty Minutes

Ines's POV

He didn't come to dinner.

Avó ate with a plate of kale soup in front of her and her cane across her lap.

She watched the empty chair at the head of the table.

"He is angry," she said.

"At what?"

"He will tell you." She pushed her bowl away. "Or he will not, and you will find out in the kitchen at midnight. It is a family tradition."

She went up to bed at nine.

I washed the dishes, and I dried them, and I wiped the long counter twice.

At eleven-forty the back door opened.

Vasco came in smelling of the dock, diesel and cold salt, with his jacket open and his face shut.

He stopped in the doorway of the kitchen.

I put the dish towel down.

"You've been to the church," I said.

"How do you know?"

"Because you've got candle wax on your cuff, and you're looking at me like I stole something."

He stood very still.

"The sexton says he saw you," he said. "At the window of the bride's room, at ten-forty. He says you stood there for twenty minutes."

I didn't answer.

"You knew she was gone."

"I found her ring."

"Ten-forty," he said.

"Ten-forty."

"And you didn't come downstairs."

"No," I said.

He crossed the kitchen and stopped a foot from me, and I smelled the whiskey he hadn't had.

"Four hundred people," he said.

His voice was very low.

"Four hundred people in that church, my grandmother in a wheelchair, my family, the whole fleet. And you stood at a window and watched her drive away, and you let her go. You gave her a head start."

"Yes."

"Why?" he said.

"Because she was my sister."

"I'd have caught her."

"No, you wouldn't," I said.

"I'd have been on Route 6 in five minutes."

"And then what? You drag her back in her wedding dress? You put her in the aisle with a gun to her back? You'd have had a bride who hated you."

"I'd have had a wedding," he said.

"Is that what you wanted?"

His hand slammed flat on the counter beside my hip.

The dishes in the rack rang.

"I wanted not to be the man they pitied," he said. "I wanted to walk up that aisle and not look at four hundred faces and know every one of them thought I'd been left. I got that. I got that, in front of the whole town. And you could have stopped it."

"I couldn't."

"You could have given me twenty minutes."

I looked at him.

He was breathing hard.

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