The One He Never Held novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: The Boat Yard

Damian's POV

I told Jo I was going to the bank.

It was the first lie I had told her since the day we met, and I told it with my coat already on.

She looked up from the ledger on Tim's kitchen table. She had been copying pages by hand since six in the morning.

"Take your phone," she said.

"I will."

"Damian."

"I'll be back by lunch."

She watched me go down the stairs. I felt her eyes on my back all the way to the door.

Lionel's sedan sat across the street from Kettle & Page. It had sat there since Monday.

Jo could not move without that car behind her. The bookkeeper would not talk to anyone but her.

I was the only one of us they had stopped watching.

I was a man who had resigned in front of three hundred employees. Nobody follows a man who has nothing left to sign.

Hailey had told me one thing on Monday night, in the dark of the spare room, when she thought I was asleep on the couch.

"He used to meet me by the water," she'd said into the pillow. "Harbor Street. The boat yard. He said nobody ever looks at a boat yard."

I took the train to the end of the line and walked the last mile along the lake.

The yard was a gravel lot full of boats under blue tarps.

At the far end stood a narrow wooden shed with a light on.

I knocked.

Nothing.

"I'm Damian Deverill," I said to the door. "Jo Chamberlin's husband. I'm not here for Lionel. I came alone."

The latch turned.

He looked worse than he had at the motel. He had lost weight in two days. He held a wrench in one fist.

"How did you find me?"

"Hailey."

"She shouldn't have."

"She wants you to be the father of her child. She'd like you alive for it."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The One He Never Held from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.