He Bought My Nights in the Dark, and I Hated Him by Day novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: The Seventeenth of May

Henrik's POV

I opened every shutter in the cabin before she had her coat off.

There were six of them, bolted since the day I bought the house, and the bolts were stiff.

I drew them one at a time, and the May light came in across the boards in six long bars.

Astrid stood in the middle of the floor with her hand on her belly and watched me do it.

I asked her nothing.

That morning on the pier I had held her hand while a hundred backs turned on the man at the microphone.

I had said nothing then, and I had nothing to say now.

"It's bright," she said.

"It's the lake."

"I've seen it."

"Not from in here," I said.

I crossed the floor and went down on my knees in front of her.

She was sixteen weeks along, and she had a small hard curve under her dress that had not been there in March.

I put both hands around it.

I had carried a dead man's last words for twenty months, and I had never held anything that weighed so little and meant so much.

I pressed my face to it.

She smelled of cedar soap, which was mine, and under it of her.

"Hello," I said into her dress. "It's your father. I'm told I talk too little."

Astrid laughed, and her hand came down in my hair.

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