My Stranger Became My Stepbrother, Then Our Parents Divorced novel · Chapter 13 of 24
Chapter 13: The Shield
Nils's POV
I sat in my truck at the foot of the lift bridge with my shirt buttoned wrong and the engine off.
The bridge went up for a freighter.
It rose two hundred feet, all steel and counterweights, and I watched it and thought: I know how that works.
I had known how everything worked since I was twelve.
I was twelve when my mother packed the Buick in the driveway.
My father stood on the porch with his arms folded.
She asked me to come, and I stood between them with my hockey bag in my hand.
"What's mine, I keep," my father said, to her, not to me.
I put the bag down.
She drove away.
I did not see her for five years, and by then I did not know what to say.
She called on my birthday every year, and I let it ring.
After I turned eighteen I stopped letting it ring and just did not look.
That was the whole story, and I had never told it to anyone in order.
I had told it to myself instead, as a rule.
Never keep anyone.
You keep people and they shrink.
You say mine, and what you've said it to goes quiet in a chair at the foot of a table.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of My Stranger Became My Stepbrother, Then Our Parents Divorced are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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