Sinning with My Fiancé's Twin Brother novel · Chapter 20 of 32

Chapter 20: One Arm

Aurore came pounding up the road with the lantern a minute later, out of breath, her braid half undone.

She saw the arm and stopped dead.

Then she set the lantern down in the road and pushed up her sleeves.

"Right," she said. "What do we do?"

We got him up onto Sable between us.

He rode home bent over the arm, gray in the face, and didn't make a sound the whole mile.

I led Sable at a walk.

Aurore led Gambit and talked the entire way, about the ham, about the cold, about anything, so none of us had to listen to his breathing.

At our kitchen table, I cut his sleeve off with Mama's sewing scissors.

The arm was swollen and dark below the elbow.

"The doctor's in New Iberia till after Christmas," Aurore said.

"Then you'll do it," Laurent said to me.

"I've never set an arm."

"You've watched your papa set a dozen legs. It's the same, with fewer hooves." He tried to smile and didn't manage it. "Aurore holds my elbow. You pull my hand, slow and steady, straight out, till the bones come level. Then you let them back together."

"And you?"

"I'm going to say some words your papa never taught you."

Aurore fetched the shingle laths left over from the roof.

I tore the bottom ruffle off my petticoat in strips.

Then Aurore braced her feet and took his elbow in both hands, and I took his wrist.

"Look at me," I said.

He looked at me.

I pulled.

He didn't say any words at all.

He went white, and the sweat ran down into his beard, and he kept his eyes on my face the whole time.

I felt the bones grind and then slide and then settle.

"There," he breathed. "That's it. Hold it."

Aurore laid the laths along it, and I bound them with the petticoat strips, wrist to elbow, tight.

When it was done, he put his good hand flat on the table and let his head fall forward onto it.

Aurore poured him a glass of Papa's brandy.

Then she poured one for me.

Then she drank one herself, standing up, and coughed for a full minute.

"Merry Christmas," she said hoarsely.

We made him a bed in the little back room off the kitchen, by the warm stove wall, so he wouldn't have to climb the ladder.

On Monday morning he made me carry Papa's chair out to the fence rail.

"You can't train me from a chair."

"Watch me." He sat down in it with his arm in a sling made of Aurore's shawl and Papa's watch in his good hand. "Go."

So I went.

He trained me from that chair every dawn of Christmas week, wrapped in a horse blanket, shouting.

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