My Stepbrother Came Home for the Anniversary, and I Didn't Know Him novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Canoe Tarp

"What did she say to you?" I asked.

Rain hammered the tin roof of the boathouse, and I had to raise my voice over it.

"Ask her," Matti said.

He stood with his back to the kayak racks and his arms folded, and the one bare bulb over the door put a hard line of light along his jaw.

I had found him there at nine at night with a thermos and a folded blanket, and I hadn't gone in to be kind.

"I'm asking you," I said.

"I know."

"She had her hand on your sleeve. She was shaking you. What did she say?"

"Ask her," he said again.

"Was it the money?"

His head came up.

"You don't get to ask about the money," he said.

It came out flat and cold, and it was my own rule, thrown back at me in a voice I had never heard from him.

"I made that rule," I said.

"You did," he said. "You said we never talk about it. So we don't."

"I'm asking because my mother..."

"Then ask your mother."

"Don't you dare put this on her," I said.

"I'm not putting anything on anyone."

"You walked out of this house," "with my father's money in your duffel bag, and now you stand here and refuse to even..."

"You told me I wasn't your brother."

I stopped.

He had taken one step toward me, and the light from the bulb fell across his face.

His eyes were bright, and his mouth was tight, and his hands were hanging open.

"I was eighteen," he said. "I stood in that driveway at midnight, and you looked at me, and you told me I wasn't your brother. You didn't ask me one question, Kaisa. Not one."

Rain drummed on the roof, and neither of us moved.

"You called me a thief in front of the neighbors' porch light," he said. "I carried my bag to the truck, and you stood there and let me."

"You were a thief."

I hit him.

I hadn't meant to, but my arm was already moving, and my palm cracked across his cheek hard enough to turn his head.

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