They Sold Me, Then My Dead Mother Came to Take Me Home novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: Fourteen Stairs

Jonas's POV

I had a ring in my sock drawer, and I had had it there for two years.

It was my mother's, a plain gold band with a small stone, and my father had never known I took it from her jewelry box.

On Friday night I took it out and put it back four times.

Mara was downstairs in the front hall with her cane hooked over the newel post.

I could hear her breathing from the landing.

"What are you doing?" I called.

"Practicing."

"On what?"

"On this."

I came to the head of the stairs and looked down.

She stood at the bottom of the staircase with one hand on the banister and her chin up.

It was the staircase she had fallen down at twenty-one.

I had been in the barn that night, and I had heard it from across the yard.

I had carried her up these steps myself the next morning.

I had not slept for a week.

"Mara," I said. "You don't have to."

"I know I don't."

"Then come up the other way. The back stairs are shallower."

"No."

She set her foot on the first step.

I did not move.

I had promised never to touch her unless she said.

I had promised never to look at her legs.

I had broken both and been forgiven.

I did not break either promise now.

She went up the staircase one stair at a time.

Her knee shook on the fourth.

She paused on the seventh with her forehead against the banister, her whole body trembling.

"Jonas," she said.

"Yes."

"If I fall."

"I'll be there before you land."

"I know. That's the only reason I'm doing it."

She took the eleventh step, and the twelfth, and when she reached the landing she stood in front of me with her hair stuck to her forehead and tears running openly down her cheeks.

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