The Boss Said My Father Drowned His Brother, So He Took Me to Stand in the Water novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: No

I told him no on Friday night, at the kitchen table in the bluff house, with the dishes done and the long cloth already laid for Sunday in the next room.

He had not asked me for anything.

That was what made it possible.

All day we had moved around each other like two people carrying something heavy through a narrow door.

The caretaker had put my father back in the vault under a tarp, and the priest had come up from the church at noon to say the words.

Stellan stood at the foot of the grave through all of it with his hat in his hands.

Now he sat across from me with a mug of coffee gone cold and his sleeves pushed up, looking at the grain of the wood.

"You were going to say something," he said.

"I was going to wait until Sunday."

"Say it now."

I put both hands flat on the table.

"In the lot at the Hillside House," I said, "you stood in the snow in front of my night nurse and told her my father was a coward and a thief."

"Yes," Stellan said.

"I've heard it every night since."

"I know," he said.

"You don't," I said. "Let me tell you what it is."

He looked up.

"It's a house with ten beds. I've worked there five years, and it's the one place in this city where I'm not Tauno Lahti's girl who ran with the money," I said. "A woman died in room two with her hand in mine, and she asked me to sing, and I sang, and nobody there ever said *your father*."

← Chapter 13 · All chapters · Chapter 15 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend