Seducing My Dad's Best Friend novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Gabe's POV

Gabe's POV

I did not sleep.

I sat at the table in the Carol Ann until the window went from black to gray, and I watched the ladder.

Nobody came back up it.

At six I put on my boots and walked out to the end of the dock, because it was the only place in the yard where I could not hear the boat creak.

I had called Stan at eleven.

I had said: "Vicky knows. I'm sorry."

He had hung up without a word.

Now he was coming down the planks in his good flannel with a thermos, and I knew by the set of his shoulders that he had not slept either.

He stopped beside me and poured coffee into the lid and handed it over.

"She went by the house at midnight," he said. "She didn't stop. She went by on the lake road side."

"She's driving it."

"Is she hurt?"

"I don't know."

"You didn't follow her."

"She asked me not to."

He looked at the water.

"Fourteen years I've known," Stan said. "I told you it was an accident, and I think you never once believed me."

"I wanted to."

"Then hear it again. I meant it. I mean it now."

"Stan."

"Let me finish. I've been rehearsing it all night."

I let him.

"I never stopped being angry at the road," he said. "Not once at you. You were twenty-eight years old and you'd had two beers and I handed you my wife and said take her home. If you'd been another man I would have driven her myself."

"You couldn't have known."

"Neither could you."

I drank the coffee.

It tasted like nothing.

"I asked you for the promise because I was afraid," he said. "I thought if she found out she'd lose you, and I'd lose her, and I'd have nobody left. I was wrong to ask it. You know that."

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