My Stepsister Ran From the Wedding, So My Stepmother Sold Me to the Man Who Hates Her Mother novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: The Ring in the Ice

Marcello's POV

The seawall was gone in four places.

I walked it at seven in the morning with the driver beside me, in boots.

The wet gray light smelled of mud and dead fish.

The great blocks that my grandfather had set stood in the street where the surge had carried them.

A shrimp boat lay on her side in the middle of Avenue B with her nets still strung.

Somebody had spray-painted a name on her hull in red, and I could not read it from where I stood.

"The Mary Ignazia held," said the driver.

"Did she?"

"Third berth. Chains didn't part. Not a plank out of her." He swallowed. "The ice house lost its roof, sir. The stock is fine. The cold stayed in the walls."

"Good."

"And the dock office. The lease is on the wall. It's dry."

I stood in the street with the hot sun coming up over the wreck of the Strand and found that I was grinning.

The driver looked at his boots, politely.

By nine I had the whole Pier 19 dock in the compound's front yard.

Every captain.

Every deckhand's wife.

The cooks.

They stood on the wet lawn in whatever they had slept in.

I stood on the porch step with a folder in my hand and Nina's father in his chair at my side.

"I have something to say," I said.

Nobody moved.

"The lease on the Pier 19 dock has been in my family's name since my grandfather."

I looked down the rows of faces.

"It has been the price of every marriage and every feud and every funeral on this waterfront."

I opened the folder.

"As of this morning it belongs to the dock."

It took a moment to land.

The old captain took off his cap.

"A cooperative," I said. "Every boat holds a share. The cold-storage rates are set by the vote of the captains, not by me."

I turned to the chair beside me.

"The first name on the deed is Ignazio Scalise, who held this dock for thirty years. He was silenced by a woman I ought to have seen through."

I laid the pen in his good hand.

He looked at it for a long moment.

Then he signed, in a huge, shaky, left-handed scrawl.

A shout went up.

It was nothing I had ever heard on that lawn.

It was a roar, ragged and glad.

Men were slapping each other's backs, and the old captain was weeping openly into his cap.

I stood in it with my chest tight.

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