Exiled for Saying No, I Came Back and Took the Boss's Chair novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The Cot

Ronan's POV

I saw Lotta Cusumano say no when she was nineteen, and I have never forgotten it.

It was the St. Joseph's table at Holy Rosary, the one day of the year both houses ate under one roof.

My father stood up with a glass of wine and offered her in marriage to my brother Fergal.

The whole North End went quiet.

She sat at the head of the long table in a green dress, with her father on her right, and she put down her fork.

"No, thank you," she said.

She said it clearly, to my father's face, in front of four hundred people.

She could have been scared, and she wasn't.

I stood at the back wall with a plate of bread and thought: that is the bravest thing I have ever seen a woman do.

The next day I heard she had laughed in Fergal's face on the church steps.

I never made the two girls fit together.

A week later I walked out of my father's house and bought a smoker.

I told myself the two things had nothing to do with each other.

For eleven years I drove past the Cusumano house on Sunday afternoons.

I never stopped.

That is what I was thinking about in the back office of the Pit on Monday night.

The door was shut, and I was waiting for a woman who had said she would come.

She came at eleven.

I heard her boots on the concrete, and I stood up from the cot.

She had her mother's apron balled in one fist, because she had come straight from the rosary.

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