My Loving Family Paid to Destroy Me novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: Hank's Price
Hank picked the diner on Route 9, the one with the gravel lot.
I did not know why until Laurel stopped in the doorway and looked at the third parking space from the road.
"That's where I stood," she said quietly. "On the first of every month."
She walked past it without turning her head.
Hank sat in the back booth with his big hands around a coffee cup and his brown work jacket buttoned to the neck.
He looked older than he had in the barn.
He had shaved his beard off, and his chin was pale and soft.
"Thayer," he said. "Missus."
"Don't call me that," said Laurel.
She slid in across from him.
I sat beside her, and her knee pressed against mine under the table, hard.
A waitress poured two coffees and went away.
"You have a price," I said.
"I do."
"If it's money, I'll find it."
"I've got money, kid." He almost smiled. "I've got two sets of it."
"Then what?"
Hank looked at Laurel.
He looked at her for a long, uncomfortable time.
"Five years," he said. "Sixty payments. Not one late."
"I know how many."
"I've done this work thirty years, and I've never been paid by a customer who was that regular. Your father paid once, Thayer. In an envelope, in a parking lot, and he wouldn't look me in the eye."
"What do you want, Hank?" Laurel said.
"I want you to say it."
"Say what?"
"That I kept my side." He put his cup down. "That the boy lived because I made it so. That I never touched his face, and I got him a doctor, and I put the books under the door."
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