Rule One Said I Was the Only Person Awake After Midnight, but My Mother Never Sleeps novel · Chapter 22 of 24
Chapter 22: Ice-Out
They came up out of the trees in the gray light with flashlights and thermoses and kids on their shoulders.
There were sixty or seventy of them, the same faces I'd seen at the New Year's party.
The cook was with them, and the deputy, and the doctor's son-in-law, and the nephew from Lake Placid.
They came up the lawn talking and laughing about the truck across the gate.
Then the ones in front saw the porch, and the talking stopped.
Mr. Coe stood at the top of the steps in his good coat.
Behind him, on the porch swing, sat a small woman with silver hair, parted on the right, her wool coat folded in her lap.
Inside the glass doors, the same woman sat on the lobby bench in a blanket, asleep on my shoulder.
A woman from town put her hand over her mouth.
"Hiram?" someone called. "What's going on?"
He didn't answer.
He took out his gold watch and opened it.
The town had come up that drive before six every ice-out for almost a hundred years.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of Rule One Said I Was the Only Person Awake After Midnight, but My Mother Never Sleeps are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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