My Stepmother Sold the Farm, So I Married the Man Who Left novel · Chapter 8 of 32

Chapter 8: Nels's POV: Hilda's Kitchen

Nels's POV

I lay on my back with my hand on a pillow above my heart, the way she had ordered, and I did not sleep.

Sol slept on her side of the line with her face to the wall.

Her braid had come loose from its tie and lay across the pillow, and the gray light made it nearly white.

I had told myself for six years that I'd forgotten the sound of her laugh.

She had laughed tonight in the kitchen over a story about a tin roof, and I had felt it all the way down.

I wanted her.

I had wanted her longer than I'd admit to anyone, and the wanting had never once been clean.

The night Haakon died, I was the reason he was on Highway 53.

A man who gets his best friend killed does not get to look at that friend's sister.

So I had left, and I had stayed gone, and I had paid what I could in the only way I knew how.

Now I was in her bed, and she'd put pillows between us.

That was correct.

That was the arrangement, and I'd keep it if it killed me.

At five I slid out from under the quilt, found my boots by feel, and went down the back stair on the outside of each tread so the boards wouldn't talk.

Delores's light was off.

I thought, for the first time, that she slept lightly and listened.

Hilda lived two miles east along the ridge road in a white house with a green Ford pickup in the yard.

She was up.

She was always up.

She opened the kitchen door in a flowered apron before I knocked, and looked at the bandage.

"Travis," she said.

"The trailer latch."

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