My Fake Wedding Was the Start of Their Real Prison novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Upstairs

Caelen drove me to South Boston himself, because my mother told him to.

He had an old gray pickup with a hockey bag in the back and a parking ticket on the dash.

He didn't say a word for six blocks.

"You can talk," I said. "I won't sign anything."

His jaw moved.

"Funny."

"I've been told I believe everything I hear. So go ahead. Tell me something."

"The heat in your unit runs hot. The back stairs creak on the fourth step. My grandmother lives on the first floor, and she'll feed you whether you're hungry or not." He turned onto East Fifth. "Don't say no to her. It doesn't work."

"Was that so hard?"

"Yes."

The triple-decker was pale yellow with three stacked porches and a light over the door that buzzed.

A tiny woman in a cardigan stood on the front stoop with her arms crossed.

Eighty-one, Caelen said later. She looked like she could still carry a sack of potatoes up three flights.

She squinted at me as I climbed out of the truck.

Then she clapped both hands to her cheeks.

"It's the cake girl!"

Caelen closed his eyes.

"Gran saw the video," he said.

"Half a dozen times," his grandmother said proudly. "Get in here, sweetheart. You're skin and bones, and that man was a pig."

She took my arm and steered me straight into her kitchen.

It smelled like onions and butter and forty years of Sunday dinners.

A pot sat on the stove the size of a laundry basket.

She ladled out a bowl of clam chowder and pointed me into a chair.

"Eat."

I ate.

It was the best thing I'd tasted in a month.

Caelen leaned in the doorway with his arms folded and watched me.

"You work for him?" his grandmother asked me.

"Sort of. He thinks I'm a criminal."

She turned and looked at her grandson.

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