My Stepbrother Came Home for the Anniversary, and I Didn't Know Him novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Basement Room

Kaisa's POV

I slapped my palm flat on his driver's window, and he rolled it down.

My feet were bleeding a little on the frozen asphalt, and I didn't feel them.

"Get back on the sidewalk," Matti said. "You'll get hit."

"Wednesday."

"What?"

"I'm coming to Fargo on Wednesday. Be there," I said.

He looked at me for a long moment with both hands on the wheel.

"You told me to go," he said.

"I told you to report. I didn't tell you to stay gone."

"Kaisa..."

"Say yes," I said.

"Yes," he said.

I went back up the steps with my feet burning, and I didn't turn around.

On Wednesday I drove four hours on I-94 with the heater on high and the radio off.

The clinic had given me two days without asking why, because I had never taken one.

I had a bag on the back seat and a bruise on each hip.

I hadn't spoken to her since the tent.

The address was a gray house on a street of gray houses, with a side door that went down to the basement.

I knocked, and he opened it in his work clothes with soot on his neck and his sleeves pushed up.

He had been on a boiler job all day.

He looked at me on his step, and his whole face did something it had never done in front of me.

It opened.

Then he shut it again, carefully, and stood aside.

The room was low and bare, with a hot plate, a duffel, a calendar from a pipe supply house and a double bed with an iron frame.

His work belt hung on a nail by the door, thick brown leather, with the pouch still on it.

I put my bag down.

"I'm not here for the money," I said.

"Okay."

"I'm not here because of her, or what she did, or what I did. I'm not here to say sorry again. I said it on the rocks and I meant it, and I'll say it a hundred more times if you want it."

"Kaisa," he said.

"I told you to go because I was scared," I said. "I wanted to say stay, and I thought if I asked you'd say yes because you felt sorry for me, and I wouldn't know. So I said go. I thought if you went and came back, it would be you."

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