He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Cold Room

He took me to the cold room at ten at night.

"I want to show you where I work," Cal said.

"You've shown me your office."

"That isn't where I work."

The Reese Cold Chain yard sat on the Mobile River south of the Cochrane bridge.

It was forty acres of white trailers and loading docks under sodium lights, and a warehouse the size of an aircraft hangar with its doors rolled down.

A night guard nodded at him and did not look at me.

Inside, the air was so cold it hurt my teeth.

We walked past stacks of pallets wrapped in blue film and forklifts parked in rows.

At the back stood a steel door with a handle as long as my arm and a red digital readout over it.

34°.

"Walk-in," he said. "Shrimp, oysters, crab. We hold it at thirty-four."

"Why am I here?"

"Because this is the one place I know exactly what I'm afraid of."

He hauled the door open.

White light spilled out, and a breath of frozen air.

The room was the size of a barn.

Shelves of steel racking ran to the ceiling, loaded with boxed seafood, and the floor was bare concrete.

The door swung shut behind us with a heavy sound.

He did not lock it, because it had no lock.

"I built this room," he said. "Every inch. I wanted to stand inside the cold and have it be mine."

I wrapped my arms around myself.

My breath smoked.

"You said I watched," I said.

"I did," he said.

"You said it in the kitchen and you never took it back. I want to say something now. I want you to listen all the way to the end."

"I'll listen," he said.

I stood in front of him on the concrete, shivering in my denim jacket.

"You counted the steps from the hatch to the rail," I said. "You've counted them for sixteen years, and you've told me the number twice. And not once, Cal, not one time, have you asked me what I did."

"What did you do?" he said.

"I'm not going to tell you yet."

"Then I'm done listening."

"That's the point," I said. "You don't ask. You decided what I was when you were fourteen, and you've been looking at that girl with a book ever since. You never went looking for the rest of her."

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