Swallow Me Whole novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: Don't Call It That
The door opened four inches, and a slice of hall light fell across the floor.
Ashton's arm tightened around my waist, and I stopped breathing.
"Ash?" Keeva whispered. "Sade? You guys up?"
Neither of us moved.
She stood there for a long, long time.
I could see the shape of her through my eyelashes, tall and rumpled in a T-shirt, one hand on the knob.
"Okay," she said, so softly I almost missed it. "Night, goblin. Night, Ash."
The door clicked shut.
The hall floor creaked away from us, toward her room.
Ashton did not sleep after that.
I know, because I didn't either.
At seven that morning he was gone from the bunk room.
When I came down to the kitchen, Mom was frying bacon and Dad was reading the paper and Keeva was nowhere.
Ashton was nowhere too.
I found him at the boathouse.
It sits at the end of a long gray dock behind the house.
It has a green door that sticks and slatted walls that let the daylight in stripes.
Inside, it smells of lake water, old rope and wet wood.
My dad's aluminum fishing boat rested on a trailer there.
Its nose pointed at the back wall, and its hull stood a foot from my face when I stepped in.
Ashton stood at the far end with his back to me, his hands braced on a workbench.
He stared at a coil of rope.
"She knows," he said.
"She said goodnight."
"She stood in that door for a full minute."
"She doesn't know."
"Sadie, she knows. She's known me twenty years. She looked at the two of us and said goodnight like she was reading a script."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of Swallow Me Whole are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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