The Widowed Don Hired a Doctor for His Son, and She Brought Two Boys Who Wore His Face novel · Chapter 12 of 24
Chapter 12: Rocco's Room
Nico and I opened the door of his brother's room at nine that night.
The guest house stood at the back of the compound behind the garden, a small whitewashed building with a tin roof and an outside stair.
The key turned stiffly.
The door stuck, swollen from five damp summers, and Nico put his shoulder to it until it gave.
The air smelled of dust and old wool and, very faintly, a man's aftershave.
I stood on the threshold with my hand over my mouth.
There was a narrow bed and a pair of boots under it, one laced and one not.
There was a blue coat over a chair and a desk with a coffee mug on it.
In the mug was a toothbrush.
Above the desk, on a corkboard, was a pinned photograph of a laughing girl in scrubs outside a dentist's office in Beaumont.
I hadn't known he had taken it.
"That's you," Nico said.
"That's me," I said.
"He loved you."
"He did.
"I was a terrible medical student."
Nico made a sound that was half a laugh.
He walked to the middle of the room and turned in a slow circle.
"I haven't been in here since the week he died," he said.
"My mother locked it, and I let her.
"I told myself it was a kindness."
"It was," I said.
"It was cowardice," he said.
"It can be both."
He knelt by the bed, drew out the boots, and set them on the floor side by side.
Then he went very still with his hand on the bedpost.
"What is it?" I asked.
"The bed's made," he said.
"Rocco never made a bed in his life.
"Somebody has been in here, gone through his things, put it all back and made the bed."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of The Widowed Don Hired a Doctor for His Son, and She Brought Two Boys Who Wore His Face are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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