My Stepbrother's Regret novel · Chapter 16 of 32

Chapter 16: A Grifter's Daughter

We didn't talk on the way back.

Roarke drove with both hands on the wheel at ten and two.

At the shop he parked in the loading zone and didn't turn the engine off.

"I'm going to go hit a punching bag," he said. "I'll be back."

"Okay."

I went in the back door and sat down at my bench and took apart a watch.

It wasn't even a broken one. It was the old man's own pocket watch, which he kept in the drawer and never wound.

I laid every screw in the parts tray in a row, smallest to largest.

That's what my hands do when the rest of me doesn't work.

Four million dollars, in my name.

The CFO saying "a week" and nobody listening.

My mother in pale pink, saying Wichita, saying twelve, saying she practiced.

I'd been nine years old in Wichita.

At twelve we were in Joplin.

She'd gotten the town wrong, and nobody in that room knew, and it didn't matter one bit.

My boss came back at six with his cane and a paper bag.

He put a turkey sandwich on my bench, away from the screws, and looked at his pocket watch in pieces.

"I haven't wound that since my brother died," he said.

"I'll put it back."

"Don't. Clean it. It runs slow." He sat down on the daybed with a grunt. "The chain man came in again. I told him Labor Day. I told him I've got a girl who'll have the money by Labor Day. Don't make me a liar, kid."

"I have zero dollars."

"Then you have six weeks and zero dollars." He pointed his cane at the sandwich. "Eat."

Mags came down the fire escape at nine with a bottle of cheap red and two coffee mugs.

She sat on the floor by my bench and poured.

"Tell me the plan," she said.

"There's no plan."

"There's always a plan. You're your mother's kid."

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