My Stepsister Ran From the Wedding, So My Stepmother Sold Me to the Man Who Hates Her Mother novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: The Page

The boat came in under the lighthouse with its running lights off.

I watched it from the end of the camp dock, with Marcello's shirt around my shoulders and my hair dripping.

It was a white fiberglass cruiser with a flybridge, the kind men from Houston keep for fishing, and it cut a straight line across the bay through the first of the rain.

There were three men on its deck.

Behind them, at the rail, in a cream raincoat with a hood up, stood a woman with a handbag on her arm.

"Get Priscilla in the truck," said Marcello.

He had his shirt back on and his phone against his ear, and he was talking low and quick to somebody on the Strand.

I took her by the elbow.

She was shaking so hard I could hear her teeth.

We put her in the cab of the pickup between us, with the duffel on her lap, and Marcello turned the key.

The cruiser had reached the camp's little dock.

I saw the men step off onto the boards.

I saw Carmela follow them, picking her way in her good shoes.

She did not run.

She stopped at the foot of the dock, in the rain, and looked straight across the shell lot at the truck.

I knew that she could see me through the windshield.

She lifted her hand and gave a small wave, the one she used at church.

Marcello put the truck in gear and drove.

We went down the shell road at forty with the rain coming sideways.

Eleven of his men were waiting at the ferry ramp in two black cars, with their jackets over their heads, and the driver stood by the bumper with a phone in each hand.

"The causeway?" said Marcello.

"Not yet, sir," said the driver. "By noon, they say."

"Then we've got till noon," said Marcello.

We rode the last ferry across to Galveston in a half-empty car deck, with the gulls screaming and the whole bay heaving.

Nobody spoke.

Priscilla's head had come to rest on my shoulder, and I did not move it.

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