The World Never Ended novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Terms

By evening the crew had gone home, and I sat at a folding table in Shane's office with a paper plate of rice.

I had eaten the whole plate in under a minute, because the compound never gave us more than a minute.

Shane watched me do it and said nothing, and slid his own plate across the table.

I ate that too.

"There's a cot in the back," he said. "A heater. A lock."

"On which side?"

"The inside." He took a key off his ring and put it on the table next to my plate. "That's the only key. I'll sleep out on the floor by the bunks."

I looked at the key.

In five years nobody had given me a key to anything.

My first thought was that it was a trick, and my second thought was that I had no right to think that about a man who was holding out his own door.

I thought it anyway.

"Why are you being kind to me?" I said.

"Because you're hurt."

"Dean was kind to me for six years."

He was quiet for a second.

"That's fair," he said.

"So if you do something nice, I'm going to look for what you're getting out of it. Every time."

"Then look."

"I'm not going to forgive you."

"I haven't asked."

"You stayed," I said. "You stayed for five years, and you heard me, and you stayed."

His burned forearm lay on the table between us, scarred pink from wrist to elbow, and he did not move it.

"Yes," he said.

I let that sit, because I wanted him to feel it.

Then I took a breath and did what Dean had never done in all the years I knew him, which was to say plainly what I needed.

"Here are the rules," I said.

"Go ahead."

"First. You never lie to me. Not to be kind, not to spare me, not because it's easier. If you don't know, say you don't know. If you did it, say you did it."

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