My Stepmother Sold Me to the Alpha Who Hates My Father's Name, and the Child He Wants Is the Proof That Clears It novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: The Cabin
The man in the bed at Beech Ridge had four days left, and he knew it, and he wanted his tea hot.
"Hot," said Mr. Preston. "Not warm."
"Hot," I said, and put the cup in his hands.
His daughter had let me in at six on Monday evening without asking a question.
She stood in the kitchen doorway of the little log cabin with her coat on over her nightgown.
"You've had a bad night," she said.
"A bad week."
"Sit down, then. There's coffee."
I did not sit down.
I washed his face and his hands and changed the pad under him.
I turned him on his side with a pillow at his back.
I had done it three hundred times.
It was the one thing in my life I knew exactly how to do, and my shoulders came down for the first time in ten days.
"You smell different," said Mr. Preston.
He was a retired schoolteacher with a voice like dry paper.
"I'm told," I said.
"Somebody's got a little one in the oven."
I laughed.
I had not laughed since the fire, and it hurt.
"I'm afraid so," I said.
"Is it a good thing?"
I thought about it.
"I don't know yet," I said. "It's mine."
"That's the right answer," said Mr. Preston. "Mine's a grandson in Raleigh who won't call. Sit down a minute."
I sat on the edge of the bed.
He looked at me with his pale wet eyes for a long while.
"You're carrying something besides the baby," he said.
"My father," I said.
I had not meant to say it.
"Dead?" he asked.
"Two years."
"What did he leave you?"
I looked at my scarred hands.
"A secret," I said. "A bridge he wouldn't let me cross. Thirty hives."
I had never told anyone anything in a patient's room that wasn't theirs.
I told Mr. Preston the whole of it in a low voice, with the stove ticking.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Stepmother Sold Me to the Alpha Who Hates My Father's Name, and the Child He Wants Is the Proof That Clears It are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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