My Stepbrother Came Home for the Anniversary, and I Didn't Know Him novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Back Stairs

Matti's POV

My father carried the heavy end of the couch up the back stairs before I could stop him.

"Dad. Your shoulder."

"My shoulder's fine."

"Your heart," I said.

"My heart has a stent in it, and the stent has a warranty." He set his end down on the landing and straightened, breathing. "Go get the other cushion."

I got the cushion.

It was the second Sunday in November, cold and bright.

The upstairs unit above Kaisa's had two rooms, a kitchen with a window onto the lake, and a floor that sloped toward the water.

I'd signed the lease the morning after she walked through it.

I'd moved everything I owned into it by noon with one trip of the Ranger.

It didn't fill the front room.

My father stood in the middle of the bare boards with his reading glasses pushed up on his head and looked around.

"It's small," he said.

"It's fine."

"It's got a good window."

"Yeah," I said.

He cleared his throat.

"Matti," he said. "Come out on the porch a minute."

We stood on the back landing with the whole sloping city below us and the lake gone steel-colored behind it.

He stood with his hands in his coat pockets, looking out, as he did when he had a thing to say and couldn't find the front of it.

"I wasn't a good father to you for five years," he said.

"Dad, that's not..."

"I called every month, and I never asked. I thought if I asked you'd stop picking up." He shook his head slowly. "Your mother told me why you left. I've been sitting with it three weeks."

"You don't have to."

"I do." He turned and looked at me directly, with his big, tired face. "You were eighteen years old, and you saw a bank letter, and you knew what it was. And you kept your mouth shut because you knew what it would do to me. My heart, and the bills, and her."

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