My Loving Family Paid to Destroy Me novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Study

I lay on top of the blanket with my eyes shut until the house went quiet.

Then I lay there two hours more.

At ten past two I heard a door open downstairs, and low voices rose through the floor.

I slid the phone out of my sock and thumbed the voice recorder on.

I went down the back stairs in my socks, one wall at a time, the way I had once learned to cross a cellar floor without a sound.

A line of yellow light lay under the study door.

I crouched beside it.

"Five years," my father said.

He was not using his warm voice.

It was flat and tired, the voice he used on contractors who were late.

"Five years you've had my money, Hank."

"I earned it," Hank said.

"You were paid to finish it that first night."

My hand stopped on the wall.

"You took the envelope," my father said. "You took the boy in the car. And then you called me the next morning and told me there'd been a complication."

"The complication had a checkbook."

Chairs creaked.

"The wife followed my car to the farm that night," Hank said. "She was at my door before breakfast. I told her who'd hired me, to be fair about the price, and she said she'd pay double to keep him breathing."

"A nurse."

"A nurse with her grandfather's farm to sell. And she never missed a month, Howard. Not one."

I could not feel my legs.

"I took both of you," Hank went on. "I'm not proud. I'm a businessman. Hers cleared first."

*Hers cleared first.*

The floor seemed to tilt under my knees.

She had watched me get dragged into a car, and she had followed it.

The next morning she had gone to the man my father hired and bought me back.

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