Married to My Ex's Uncle novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Tarp

On the dock Greta and the ex-priest uncle make a deal, and in his boathouse she finds the boat from her brother's crash with a dent and a stain on the driver's side, though Nils never had a head wound and Tanner did.

Nobody in the great hall moved.

Tanner laughed, one short bark.

"Sit down, Luke. You're embarrassing yourself."

Lukas didn't sit down.

He held Greta's eyes down the whole length of the aisle.

Then he turned and walked out the back door into the rain.

Greta stood there with two hundred people staring at her.

Then she followed him.

She found him on the dock below the lodge, ten minutes later, standing at the end of it with no umbrella.

The rain was coming in soft and gray off Eagle Harbor.

Her mother's dress was soaked to the knee.

She didn't care.

"Did you mean that?" she said.

He turned around.

Up close he looked tired, and younger than the family made him sound.

There was gray at his temples and a cut healing on one knuckle.

"I don't say things I don't mean," he said. "Bad habit. Cost me a whole career."

"You're the priest."

"I was the priest."

"You're the one Margit calls the deserter."

"She calls me worse at Christmas."

Greta almost laughed.

She knew the outline of him the way everybody on the peninsula did.

Father Luke, the Hollenbeck boy who went to seminary.

Father Luke, who left the parish in Sister Bay three years ago without a word to anybody.

Now he lived in the old boathouse on the north shore and built wooden boats nobody in the family would ride in.

"Why?" she said.

He looked at the water.

"Because my nephew said nobody would," he said. "And that was a lie, and I'm tired of lies told in that family's voice."

"That's one reason."

"I can't give you all my reasons," he said. "I can give you true ones."

The rain ran off the end of his nose.

Greta stepped closer.

His suit jacket was wet through and smelled like cedar and wet wool.

She put her hand flat on his chest without deciding to.

His heart was going hard under it.

"You don't even know me," she said.

"You rebuilt the outboard on the parish skiff for free the summer your dad died," he said. "You told me my fuel line was a crime against God."

"It was."

"I put that in my report to the bishop."

He didn't touch her back.

His hands stayed at his sides, curled shut.

She could feel him holding still, the whole length of him.

She took her hand away.

"I need to sit down somewhere that isn't here," she said.

"The boathouse is open."

It was a long gray building at the end of the shore path, half on stilts over the water.

Inside it smelled like cedar and varnish and woodsmoke.

A half-built boat sat upside down on sawhorses in the middle of the floor, all pale ribs.

There was a workbench under the windows, a stove, a ladder up to a loft.

And in the far bay, under a blue tarp, was another hull.

Greta stopped.

The tarp didn't reach all the way to the bow.

White letters showed below the hem.

MISS MARGIT.

"That boat was scrapped," she said.

Her voice came out wrong.

"Margit told the insurance company it was scrapped. She told my dad it was crushed in Green Bay the month after."

"My brother had it brought here the week after the crash," Lukas said. "It's been under that tarp nine years. It isn't mine."

"Can I look?"

He was quiet a moment.

"It's my house," he said. "You can look at anything in it."

She pulled the tarp back.

It came off in a long, dusty slide.

The runabout was smaller than in her nightmares.

Twenty-four feet of white fiberglass gone yellow, with a cracked bow and a long gouge down the side.

She climbed up on the swim step in her wedding dress.

The windshield frame on the driver's side was bent inward in a shallow dent.

There was a dark brown stain smeared over the dent and down into the seam.

Greta stood there and couldn't breathe for a second.

Then she got her phone out.

She photographed the dent from four angles with the flash on.

She photographed the stain up close, with her thumb beside it for scale.

"I need a bag," she said. "Clean. And a blade."

Lukas went to the workbench without a word.

He came back with a new box of sandwich bags and a fresh razor scraper still in its paper.

She scraped the stain into the bag and sealed it and wrote the date on it with his carpenter's pencil.

Her hands were completely steady.

She climbed down.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay what?"

"Okay, I'll marry you."

He blinked at her.

"On conditions," she said. "I get my own room. I keep my own yard, and nobody named Hollenbeck touches it. And that boat stays exactly where it is."

"That's all?"

"That's all."

"Then yes," he said. "To all three."

She held out her hand.

He shook it.

His palm was rough and warm, and he let go first.

She walked back out onto the dock and stood in the rain with the bag in her fist.

Nine years ago, on the Sunday morning of Labor Day weekend, she had sat by her brother's hospital bed in Sturgeon Bay with a deputy at the door.

He'd had a bruise on his upper arm and nothing else.

Not one mark on his face.

Not one stitch.

And that same afternoon Tanner had walked into the waiting room with flowers for her and a fresh black row of stitches through his left eyebrow.

← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend