I Left to Make Him Follow, and He Let Me Go for Three Years novel · Chapter 18 of 24
Chapter 18: The Drawing
I got dressed behind the stair housing, with my back to the wind and my cheeks burning.
Magda waited on the landing and looked at the sky, with great tact, while I found my second boot.
"I'm so sorry," she said again.
"Stop apologizing," I said. "You climbed four flights of stairs."
"Six, counting the iron ones."
"Sit down."
Ansel had brought the heater around the corner.
He set it on the gravel and spread the quilt on a crate, and Magda sat with her hands out to the warmth.
She was breathing carefully, in and out, the way she did after a stair.
I knelt in front of her and checked her face, which was pale, and her lips, which were not blue.
I did not know what I was checking for, only that I could not stop.
"I'm fine," said Magda.
"You came up the stairs on a transplant."
"I came up the stairs on a heart that has run the Great Race twice, thank you." She smiled at me. "Eleven years. She's tough."
"She?" said Ansel.
He had gone very still.
Magda looked at him.
"I've always called her *she,*" she said. "I hope that's all right."
"It is more than all right," said Ansel, hoarsely.
"I came to tell you both something." She folded her hands in her lap. "I've been a secret for eleven years. I have worked a bakery counter and gone to church at seven in the morning so nobody would look, and I have let a woman say I was kept because it was easier than saying who I was."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of I Left to Make Him Follow, and He Let Me Go for Three Years are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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