He Faked My Death, So I Let My Family Bury Me novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: The Cold Room

I went down the lemon tree faster than I had come up.

At the end of the lane, under the one streetlamp, a man in a grey coat stood with a folded newspaper under his arm.

He was looking at my sister's window.

He had not looked at the tree.

Nella had the car door open before my feet touched the ground.

"Drive," I said.

"Signora, he's right there."

"He's watching Venera. He doesn't know I exist. Drive slowly, with the lights off, and turn left at the church."

We went past him at walking pace.

He turned his head toward the engine and then away.

In the bakery flat I put the little black phone on the table and looked at it until dawn.

It buzzed again at four.

Answer, the screen said.

I did not.

At the next dusk, Nella came back from the market with her coat buttoned to the chin.

"The old night watchman is still there," she said. "He remembers you."

"He taught me to gut a sea bream when I was nine."

"He says he'll let us in at one."

At one in the morning my father's fish market lay dark under the arc lights, with the trucks parked in rows and the smell of salt and diesel in the cold air.

The watchman stood at the side door with a torch.

He had white stubble and a bad hip, and he looked at me in my black coat for a long time.

"They told us you burned," he said.

"They told everyone."

"I lit a candle."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet." He pushed the door open. "He's been coming here every night since the funeral. Sits in the cold room. Counts crates. Goes home at three."

"Then we have two hours."

He led us through the loading bay and down a ramp into the cold store, where the air hurt my teeth.

Rows of ice-packed fish boxes stretched back into the dark.

Behind the last row stood a wall of stacked pallets that did not belong there.

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