The Boss Said My Father Drowned His Brother, So He Took Me to Stand in the Water novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Left Open

I told him on Tuesday morning, on the bluff dock, in the cold, with two coffees going to ice in our hands.

We had slept in the spare room of the bluff house, because I would not take his bed and he would not take mine.

At least that was what we said.

We had slept in the same bed in our clothes, with the door open, and woke at dawn with my back against his chest and his arm over me.

Neither of us had said a word about it.

"Ask," I said.

He looked at the lake.

The ice was dark in the thin light, with long gray cracks across it, and a flat sheen of water lay along the south edge where the wind had turned.

It would be gone in a month.

"What do you want, Elin?" he said.

"I want to go back to the Hillside House tomorrow night and work my shift."

He nodded.

"I want to sleep in my mother's bed, in my own house, with the door the way I like it."

"Yes," he said.

"I want you in it sometimes, and sometimes not. I'm not coming to live in this house."

"I'd not ask," he said.

"I know. That's why I'm saying it," I said.

He turned the cup in his hands.

"I want to be a thing you don't own," I said. "Not a Kivela. Not the Harbor Master's anything. I'll not be called by your name at the church or the docks."

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