My Pet Sold Me novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: What I Owe

I opened the door in Dane's flannel shirt and nothing else but the hem.

Tobin stood on the landing with a folded sheaf of paper in both fists.

His eyes went to the shirt, then to the black boots on my doormat, and then he looked at the floor.

"I can come back," he said.

"You're here. Say it."

"I read it."

"Read what?"

"All of it." He held out the pages. "The clerk let me sit in the Estacada office for three days and copy it out by hand.

"The renewal, too."

I did not take the pages.

"The renewal was a stamp."

"It wasn't, Lara."

He said it gently, which was worse.

"Every year on my birthday you signed a paper that swore your life again, for another year, for me.

"If you'd missed one, the surety would have lapsed and the Concord would have called me feral.

"Any wolf in the gorge could have hunted me with no penalty."

"I didn't miss one."

"Seven times you walked into that office alone."

"It took ten minutes."

"It took your life ten minutes at a time," Tobin said. "And I called it a leash."

A door opened down the hall, and the nurse with the baby looked out at us and closed it again.

I pulled the flannel tighter.

"Is that what you came to tell me?"

"No."

"Then what?"

"I came to ask what I owe."

I looked at him.

The red hair had grown out over his ears.

The tape under his jacket made him stand stiffly.

"I don't want you to pay me," I said.

"I know. That's why I have to."

Behind me, the floorboards creaked.

Dane came out of the bedroom in his jeans and nothing else, with a 1 smudged on the back of his hand.

He stopped in the kitchen doorway and said nothing.

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