He Paid a Million for One Night, and the Contract Was Signed by My Mother novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Lent

"The fourteenth of January," I said. "That's what you've been carrying."

"Your mother walked into my office at the terminal at ten in the morning," Soren said. "She had pins in her mouth and a folder under her arm. She told me whose daughter you were."

"And you said yes," I said.

"I said I'd read it."

"And then you said yes."

"I said yes on the twenty-eighth," he said. "I wired the hospital the same afternoon."

I held the rail behind me.

"You could have told me. Any day. In your kitchen, on the gantry, in the truck."

"I gave her my word."

"I know what you gave her." My voice shook, and I let it. "You had days of me asking. I wrote it on the back of a letter. I said, I'll ask again Sunday. And you put it in your pocket."

"I did."

"You wanted me to ask."

"I wanted you to be told by someone who had the right," he said. "It wasn't mine."

"Then whose was it?"

"Hers. And yours."

I laughed, and it was an ugly sound.

"You wanted it in writing," Soren said, very quietly. "That day in the cloakroom, and again at the stove, and again on the porch with the letter. You would not take my word for the one thing that mattered."

I stared at him.

I had thought the hurt was all on my side.

It was on his face too, plain in the daylight.

He had been holding it so long that it had worn a place.

"That's not fair," I said.

"No," he said. "It isn't."

"I signed a paper because you handed it to me," I said.

"I handed it to you because she asked me to," Soren said. "And I stood in the boardroom and said nothing because she asked me that too."

He drew a breath.

"I've done everything she asked, Margo. I'd do it again. But I'm sorry it cost you."

I did not forgive him on the gangway.

I did not say I wouldn't.

I walked back along the dock past the families.

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