My Stranger Became My Stepbrother, Then Our Parents Divorced novel · Chapter 19 of 24
Chapter 19: The Christening
Annika's POV
By ten on the seventh of November there were four hundred people in the Lahti Marine yard.
The sky was low and white.
The new tug stood on the ways with its bow to the water.
She was forty feet of fresh black steel, with her name in white along the side.
MARIT.
A bottle of champagne hung from the bow on a ribbon.
Yard hands in clean jackets stood in rows.
The pastor was there, and a reporter with a notebook, and half of my mother's church.
My mother stood at my right in her good hat.
Nils stood on my left.
His mother stood three rows back in a gray coat with her braid down her back.
Most of the yard had not seen her in seventeen years, and no one looked twice.
Gunnar climbed the platform beside the bow with a microphone.
"Friends," he said. "Forty years ago I bought a bankrupt dock and one welder. Today we launch our twelfth vessel."
They cheered.
"A man builds a yard to hold what's his. His men, his name, his family."
He smiled.
"And a man learns that the people he trusts most can do him the deepest harm."
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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