My Sister Sat at My Groom's Feet, So I Took His Whole Pack novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Inside the Dike

Reuben's POV

I had not been inside a dike since I was eight years old.

I lay on my back in the gray light of the day of the Standing and counted the years on the ceiling.

There were twenty-eight of them.

Lucinda slept against my side with her hair across my arm.

She had eaten four eggs and half a loaf of toast at midnight, standing at my stove in my shirt.

She had come back to bed hungry anyway.

I had thought nothing of it except that she was healthy.

I thought about the letter cut into the furnace brick.

I thought about the gold truck outside the cottage, three nights in September.

She had put her fingers into that M and said nothing, and I had said nothing.

I told myself I would tell her tonight, after the circle.

I told myself that if I said it now, she would walk onto the Boom stone with it in her head.

Brant would use that.

It was a good reason.

I knew it was also a coward's reason, and I lay there with both.

"Stop thinking," Lucinda said, without opening her eyes.

"I'm not."

"You're thinking so loudly I can hear the ceiling."

She turned over, and her eyes opened.

They were soft and brown-green, and there was nothing in them but me.

"Bath," she said.

"It's seven in the morning."

"The Standing is at moonrise. I have all day. I want a bath, and I want you in it."

I had a tin tub that hung on a nail behind the house, and no one had used it in a decade.

I carried it in and set it in front of the woodstove and filled it from the kettle and the pump, until the steam rose.

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