Poisoned by His Love novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: The Garage

I did not ask about the locked door.

I went back to the big bed, got under the sheet and lay with my eyes open.

He came in twenty minutes later and slid in behind me without a word.

His arm settled around my waist.

His skin was cold.

I pretended to be asleep, and he pretended to believe me.

In the morning he was gone again, and Gianna was in the kitchen with a frying pan the size of a hubcap.

"Eat," she said.

"Gianna, what's at the end of the east hall?"

The spatula stopped.

She put the pan down very carefully.

"A room," she said. "Eat, cara. You've got a long day."

"With a lock."

"With a lock," she agreed, and looked me in the eye.

She had kind, tired, black eyes.

"Ask him. Not me."

She slid eggs onto my plate, and that was the end of it.

Sandro came in at nine in a charcoal suit with no tie.

He leaned on the counter and drank black coffee, and watched me eat.

"Your father asked to see you," he said. "He called twice."

"I'm not ready."

"You're going anyway."

"Is that an order?"

"Yes."

I put my fork down.

"If I say no?"

"Then your father comes here, and sits at my table, and you watch him try to eat."

His eyes did not leave my face.

"I'd rather you said what you need to say where he can't hide."

It was the cruelest kind of kindness.

I hated that it was also right.

The tool-rental yard sat off Pulaski Highway behind a chain-link fence, with a faded sign and four rusted forklifts.

My father stood in the office door in a cardigan that was too big for him.

He had lost weight in the last year, and I had put it down to stress.

Now I thought about nine hundred thousand dollars and I put it down to fear.

Sandro stayed in the car with the window rolled up.

I walked across the gravel alone.

"Ivy," my father said. "Honey. Thank God."

"Don't."

"I never meant for it to come to this."

"Don't say that to me."

He stopped.

I stood three feet from him with my hands in my coat pockets.

"Say what you did."

"I borrowed money, honey. I was in over my head. Cora said the Vasaris would be reasonable if Savannah..."

"Say what you did to me."

His mouth worked.

"I let you take her place," he said.

"You let them put her dress on me."

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