They Made Me Run On a Broken Leg. Don Had My Back novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Her Door

He drove me back to Bay Ridge in silence.

I watched his hands on the wheel, the scar on his wrist and the way his knuckles stayed white.

"She said something to you," he said at the second red light.

"She said you sat outside my hospital room every night."

His eyes stayed on the road.

"Why would she say that?"

"I wanted to know if you'd say it was true."

He waited until the light changed.

"It's business," he said. "I wanted to see whether the Hourigans would come back to finish it. I had a man at your door and I sat with him sometimes."

It was almost a whole answer.

I looked at the side of his face and thought, he's leaving something out.

Then I thought about the dock, the forty men and the gray-haired driver who had stepped in front of me.

I thought about the stairwell.

"Okay," I said.

He glanced at me, surprised.

"I don't want to talk about her tonight," I said.

I lay in the guest room for two hours with the lights off and the window open.

The tomatoes next door shifted in the dark.

My leg ached in a clean, plain way, an ache that belonged to a leg that was healing.

I could hear him down the hall.

Water ran in the bathroom, and then a door shut.

I looked at the ceiling and made a decision I could have made in the stairwell.

I got up.

I left the cane against the bed.

I walked down the hall barefoot in the T-shirt and shorts I slept in, with my hand on the wall, and my knee shook every other step.

His door was open six inches.

A lamp was lit.

I pushed it with two fingers.

He was standing by the window with his shirt off.

His shoulders were broad and scarred, with a long pale line along the ribs and another across his collarbone, and the burn went up past his wrist onto the inside of his forearm.

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