My Loving Family Paid to Destroy Me novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Brotherly Love

Nolan's POV

I woke at dawn on a bare mattress with my arm around a woman who was not there.

The sheet beside me was cool.

I sat up too fast, and my heart slammed once against my ribs.

Laurel stood at the hot plate in my shirt, with her back to me, pouring coffee into a chipped mug.

She did not turn around.

"It's morning," she said. "The rule says you can go."

"I heard the rule."

"Good."

"I'm staying."

She set the mug on the card table and pushed it toward me with one finger.

Her ears had gone pink.

I had never been so happy to be ignored.

I drank the coffee standing up, in my jeans, with the brick wall at my back.

It was terrible coffee.

"Saturday week," I said. "Four hundred guests, the press, and my father with a microphone."

"He wants you to sign on a stage."

"He wants the town to watch his son give him the family company, so nobody asks why it happened."

"Then you don't sign."

"I take the microphone before the pen."

Laurel crossed her arms over my shirt.

"And say what? Your father hired a man to kill you? He'll have his lawyer on the stage in four seconds. He'll tell four hundred people you're fragile and haunted and need a rest."

"He already tells them that."

"Then you need more than your phone," she said. "You need a second voice in that room. And a third."

"Hank."

"Hank will say whatever the last envelope bought." She said it flatly. "He won't come for you."

"He wants to hear you say something."

She looked at me.

"I know."

Someone knocked on the door.

We both went still.

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