Chapter 5: What You Owe Me

"You can talk in the hall," I said.

"Weston, please. Let me in."

"No."

Sabine stopped three feet from me. Her lip was trembling, and I knew every movement of that lip.

Last time it had worked on me for ten years.

"Rex's in trouble," she said. "There are men looking for him. He says he needs money, and you were the only person who ever helped him."

"I didn't help him. I paid him. He's on a payroll I closed."

"You're cutting off my family. My father says you took our house."

"I took a note against your house. He signed it."

"Because you made him." Her voice went soft and sweet. "Weston. Think about who we are. We were promised."

"You told me yesterday that was a hundred years ago."

"I was angry."

"You were certain."

She put a hand against the wall. The color went out of her face, and she swallowed hard twice before she spoke again.

"I don't feel well," she said. "I haven't felt well in days. I haven't had anything to eat."

"Then go home and have something."

"You always fixed things." Her eyes filled. "Whatever happened, you always fixed it. Fix this."

I looked at her.

I had loved this woman for most of my life. I had put her coat on her shoulders and her name on my accounts.

Three years from now, she would hold a knife in a kitchen and tell me I owed her.

"No," I said. "I'm not fixing this."

The sweetness left her face all at once.

She hit me.

It was an open hand, hard, across the left side of my jaw, and it rang in my ear.

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