He Missed the Delivery Room. I Married His Enemy Instead. novel · Chapter 20 of 32
Chapter 20: The Boathouse
I stood on my mother's porch and looked at the man I'd married.
"You'll say that in public," I said. "One day. Into a microphone."
"It would end me."
"Yes."
He looked at me like he was waiting for me to take it back.
I didn't.
He went down the steps to his car without saying goodbye to Niamh, and then he stopped at the bottom and came back up and kissed her through the screen door, on the top of her head, while my mother held her.
Then he left.
Conall's car was gone from the curb.
"He drove the girl back to Quincy," my charge nurse said from the doorway. "Then he said he had somewhere to be."
"Where?"
The kid looked up from his paperwork on the stairs.
"The boathouse," he said. "End of the long dock. He goes there when he's mad at himself."
"How often is he mad at himself?"
"Since he met you? Like every Tuesday."
My mother said she'd keep Niamh the night.
She said it before I asked.
The long dock ran out into the harbor past the cranes, past the stacks of containers and the forklifts asleep in a row.
The boathouse was at the very end, old gray shingle with a tin roof, built out over the water on pilings.
It had started to rain.
The door was open.
Inside, it smelled of cedar and varnish and the sea coming up through the floorboards.
There was a woodstove, lit.
There was a boat up on wooden stands in the middle of the floor.
A small wooden boat, sixteen feet long, the ribs and half the planks done.
Conall was sanding the other half, in an old gray sweater with the sleeves pushed up and the bandage on his arm.
He didn't stop when I came in.
"My father started her," he said. "The summer before your husband's grandfather put him away. I was fourteen. I've been finishing her ever since."
"Twenty-five years."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of He Missed the Delivery Room. I Married His Enemy Instead. are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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