He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The Apology

Cal's POV

I walked to the river because the river was the only thing in Mobile that did not know my name.

I went down Government Street in my good shoes, past the courthouse where I had bought a family's debt, and out onto the old wharf by the cruise terminal where the pelicans sat on the bollards.

I stayed there until the light went orange.

Nine hundred dollars, grown to four thousand.

Six hundred for me.

My mother had told me once that she'd paid the rent that month with a church envelope somebody left in her mailbox.

I had believed her for sixteen years.

I had built a company out of that rent.

Every truck in my yard had a number on the door, and every number was a debt I had been collecting from the wrong man.

I did not sit down.

I stood at the rail with my hands on the iron, counting the steps from the bench behind me to the water.

Eleven.

I laughed, and a woman with a stroller turned her head.

At four I got a cab to the house, because my driver had the car and I had not been able to ask him for it.

I stood in my own kitchen.

The green ledger lay on the counter where I had left it, two weeks ago, with a spoon on it.

I had read the names forty times.

I took it up and opened it at the first page, and read the entry for a widow in Pascagoula.

Five hundred a month.

No return address.

For thirteen years a girl had put money in an envelope and licked the flap and driven it to a post office four towns from home.

I had spent those same thirteen years learning what money could buy.

I read all forty-one names a final time.

Then I put the ledger back in the drawer where she kept her pens, with the cover straight, and I went and stood on the dock until her truck came down the drive.

She came up the porch steps with a duffel bag in one hand and her braid half out of its band.

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