My Alpha Stepbrother Called Me a Gold Digger, So I Bought His Father's Note novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Note

We came down off the breaks on the first day of November.

The bite on my neck had healed to a pale crescent, and the bond hummed in me like a held note.

The first thing my mother did, when I walked into the trailer kitchen, was look at my collar.

"Well," she said.

"There it is."

"There it is," I said.

She put down the dish towel and crossed the kitchen.

She put both hands on my face and looked at me for a long time.

"You look the way your father did," she said.

"The day he came home from the Great Falls fair with that stupid brass buckle."

"Is that good?"

"It's the best thing I've ever seen," said my mother.

She kissed my forehead and cried.

Then she blew her nose and told Soren, who stood in the doorway with his hat, to sit down and eat.

He sat.

He ate three helpings of her pot roast, and my mother watched him do it like a woman who had won an argument she never said aloud.

After supper she took a folder out of the hutch and laid it on the oilcloth.

It was the same manila folder she had carried down the cellar stairs.

"I've been carrying this around for two months," she said.

"I'd like to put it down."

I opened it.

The note lay inside, in its thick bank binder, with the lawyer's stamp from Havre.

My mother's name was on the lender line and mine was on the guarantee.

Under it was a separate sheet, in her round hand.

*I, Marit Brennick, assign all my right in the above note to my daughter, Kari Brennick, for love and affection.*

I looked up.

"Mom," I said.

"It's yours, baby," she said.

"I bought it for Halvard, and I'm his wife, and I'll stay his wife.

"But it was your father's money, and your father's daughter signed for it.

"If anyone should hold it, it's you."

I stared at the page.

I thought of the five years, and the furnace, and the bus at five-thirty in the morning.

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