My Mafia Husband Chose My Sister, So I Chose My Lost Love novel · Chapter 20 of 32

Chapter 20: Launch Day

I read it four times.

Then I deleted it, the way she asked.

I didn't wake Sandro.

I opened my notebook and wrote the date and the time, 3:12 a.m., and the three words, in the margin of the spring bookings.

Nine years of keeping books had taught me one thing.

You write it down, even when you don't know yet what it means.

In the morning I told the marshal.

"It could be her," she said. "It could be him, typing for her. It could be her, with him standing behind the chair."

"I know."

"So what do you want me to do?"

"Nothing," I said. "I just wanted somebody besides me to know she said it."

January was the busiest month the yard had ever had.

The phone rang every morning.

The Camden doctor sent two friends. The friends sent their friends.

I hired the boy from the bucket line on Saturdays, at fifteen dollars an hour, to sweep.

He told everyone at the co-op he worked for "the mob lady" and was very proud of it.

Sandro worked on the sloop until midnight every night that month.

The planks were done. Then the deck. Then the varnish, nine coats of it, while the shop stove roared.

I sold her the second week of January.

Not to a rich man from Camden. To a schoolteacher from Blue Hill who'd come to the yard every summer for six years to look at boats she couldn't afford.

She'd saved for twenty years.

Sandro wanted to give her a discount.

I wouldn't let him.

Then I sat down with her at the hatch-cover table and worked out a payment plan that ran three summers with no interest, and she cried, and Sandro had to go outside.

The launch was on the last Saturday in January.

It was nine degrees.

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