Married to My Ex's Uncle novel · Chapter 8 of 32

Chapter 8: Charity

The first week of the marriage, Greta learned three things about her husband.

He got up at five.

He made the worst coffee in Door County.

And he didn't own a single chair with a back on it.

"How do you live like this?" she said on Sunday morning, sitting on a stool at his workbench with a mug of something black and bitter.

"Simply."

"This coffee tastes like a tire fire."

"I let it boil. It's stronger."

"It's a crime."

"You keep saying that about my things."

"Your things keep committing crimes."

He drank his without a flicker, standing at the window in his socks.

On Monday she brought her own coffee maker up from the yard and set it on his counter.

On Tuesday she came down at six and found he'd used it, and made the coffee properly, and left her a mug with a saucer on top to keep it warm.

She didn't say anything about it.

Neither did he.

They slept on either side of the beadboard wall in the loft.

She could hear him through it.

He turned the pages of a book until about eleven, then turned off his lamp, then said his prayers under his breath.

She didn't think he knew she could hear that part.

She lay in the dark and listened to the low rhythm of it and didn't know what she felt.

The dog was his, an old black Lab who'd come with the boathouse when he moved in.

On the first night it slept beside Lukas's cot.

On the third night it slept across the doorway between their rooms.

By the fifth night it was on her mattress with its chin on her ankle.

"Traitor," Lukas said to it on Thursday morning.

The dog thumped its tail and didn't move.

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