I Stripped to Keep My Boyfriend in School, and He Sold Me to the Man My Brother Died Owing novel · Chapter 13 of 24
Chapter 13: Two Years
Matti put a chair behind me, and I sat in it because my knees had stopped asking.
He fed the stove.
He put a tin cup of black coffee with sugar in my hands and sat on the edge of the cot with his elbows on his knees.
Toby stayed in the doorway.
He had pulled the door shut and stood with his back against it and a bloody mouth, and nobody told him to come in or go.
"Tell it," I said to my brother. "From the start. Plain."
"You won't like the start," Matti said.
"I don't like the middle either."
Matti rubbed his beard with the heel of his hand.
"Two winters back I was Lars's bookkeeper's assistant at the club," he said. "You knew that."
"I knew."
"I liked the numbers, Iris. That was the trouble. I liked them enough to notice when a column didn't foot."
I watched his hands.
They were scarred from the shop and perfectly steady.
"The dock workers' pension fund," Matti said. "Eleven million dollars. It's supposed to sit in a union account in Superior where the stewards can see it."
"And?"
"It went through the club's book in three pieces over one winter and came out the other side into an account with one name on it."
"Lars's," I said.
"Lars's. He never used a second name. He didn't think anybody in that office could read."
"You could."
"I could," Matti said. "So I took the ledger out of the safe under the bar. I photocopied the transfer pages first and trusted no email. I put the book in my truck."
"The night in February."
"The night in February."
His voice had gone quiet.
"I knew they'd come for it," he said. "I took the lake road toward your place to warn you, and headlights stayed behind me that didn't turn off."
"So you went out on the ice."
"I knew the ice. I thought a truck on the ice would lose a car."
"It was February," I said.
"It was a bad February. Late. It looked like a floor."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of I Stripped to Keep My Boyfriend in School, and He Sold Me to the Man My Brother Died Owing are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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