The Man Stalking Me Said Stop Working Alone, and the Kind Vet Was the One Who Let My Tire Down novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: The Night Before

Matt's POV

The night before the meeting I cleaned the tug's wheelhouse with a rag and a bucket, because I could not make my hands be still.

I wiped down the chart table, the brass compass and the glass on three sides.

I stripped the cushion off the captain's chair and beat the dust out of it over the rail.

Across the black water the courthouse clock showed ten.

Pavel had gone home at eight with a briefcase and a hard face.

At the dock gate he had said, "Whatever she does tomorrow, you stand where you are."

I had said, "I'll stand where I'm put."

I have spent twenty years keeping the Ravnik name quiet.

Tomorrow a woman of twenty-seven would walk into a room of commissioners and tell them what that silence had cost her.

I could not stop her, and I did not want to.

I heard her on the dock before I saw her.

She came up the ladder in her parka with her braid over her shoulder.

She stopped in the wheelhouse door and looked at the bucket, and at the shining glass, and at me with the rag in my fist.

"You cleaned," said Maija.

"I couldn't sit."

"Pavel said you were scrubbing a wheelhouse at eleven o'clock at night," she said.

"He said it was the most frightening thing he had ever seen you do."

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