The Boss Said My Father Drowned His Brother, So He Took Me to Stand in the Water novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The East Plot

Stellan's POV

I buried my brother on a Tuesday in March, in snow to my knees, and I never went back to the grave.

I stood at it now at five in the morning, in the dark.

I had a cemetery caretaker with me, two drivers with a torch and a pick, and Tauno Lahti's daughter.

I had made the call myself at midnight.

I had said nothing to my mother.

The caretaker was an old man in a parka who had worked that hill for thirty years, and he did not ask me a single question.

He looked at my face, and he unlocked the shed.

"The ground's iron," he said now. "You'll need the torch to thaw it first."

"Do it," I said.

The first driver lit it.

A blue flame hissed over the frozen earth, and steam rose in a white cloud into the black.

Elin stood at the head of the grave in her peacoat, with her hands in her pockets.

She had not said a word since the truck.

I couldn't look at the stone, so I looked at her.

Her braid had come undone in the wind.

Her face was calm and white and set, and I thought, *She has stood at four hundred of these.*

I had never wanted anyone to be less alone in my life.

"It'll take an hour," the caretaker said.

It took two.

The sky went from black to gray to the thin pink of a winter dawn.

The drivers broke the thawed ground with the pick and shoveled.

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