My Stepsister Ran From the Wedding, So My Stepmother Sold Me to the Man Who Hates Her Mother novel · Chapter 21 of 24
Chapter 21: The Storm
The compound cellar ran the length of the house, under the kitchen and the long hall, with stone walls two feet thick.
By ten that night we had sixty-one people in it.
The captains' wives had brought blankets, and the deckhands had brought a cooler and a deck of cards, and somebody had set a dozen candles in a row on the old wine racks.
Above us the house shook with every gust.
Once a window went, somewhere over the kitchen, with a long wet crash, and a child cried and was hushed.
I sat on a bench against the wall with my father's chair beside me and my back against the cold stone.
He had been very quiet since the dock.
He sat under his blanket with his cap in his lap, and every so often his good hand lifted and touched my sleeve, as if to make sure I was still there.
Priscilla sat on my other side with her knees up, in Agata's sweater.
She was not talking, and she had not let go of the edge of my jacket since we came down the stairs.
Across the cellar, on an upturned crate, Agata was telling a story.
It was about the hurricane of 1983, and how the old Bellanca had floated the ice house's whole stock of shrimp across the Strand in a skiff, and fed the Coast Guard on it.
She told it with her hands.
Every few lines Marcello, sitting at her feet on the flagstones with his back against her crate, said, "That isn't how it happened, Zia."
"I was there," said Agata.
"You were at church."
"I was at church, and I saw it through the window."
The deckhands roared.
It was the first laugh I had heard in two days, and I leaned my head back against the stone and closed my eyes.
I felt his gaze before I opened them.
Marcello was looking at me across the cellar, over Agata's white head.
He did not smile.
He looked at me steadily, with the candlelight moving on his face, and I knew now what I had misread in that look since the first week.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Stepsister Ran From the Wedding, So My Stepmother Sold Me to the Man Who Hates Her Mother are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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