He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me novel · Chapter 21 of 24
Chapter 21: The Commissioner
Cal's POV
The commissioner lived on a bluff above Mobile Bay in a white house with a deep porch and a flag.
I had never seen it, and I knew it the way you know a street from a dream.
I parked at the gate at seven in the morning with the wind already tearing at the live oaks.
The sky to the south had gone the color of slate.
Jo had wanted to come.
I had told her no, and she had looked at me for a long moment with her grey eyes and said, "Then you'll tell me everything," and I had said yes.
She was at the Dog River house with her mother and a nurse and a generator, and she had put her palm flat on my chest at the door and said, "Keep your hands still."
I had promised.
I walked up the gravel drive in my grey suit.
A man was already on the porch.
He sat in a rocking chair with a cup of coffee on his knee, in a pressed white shirt and suspenders, a big soft pink man with a crest of white hair and an anchor on his tie pin.
He watched me come with an expression of pleasant surprise.
"Well," he said. "Mr. Reese. I hoped we'd have a chance to talk."
"Do you know me?"
"I know the name. I know a good many names in Mobile." He gestured at the chair beside him. "Sit. Have some coffee. They say the storm's turned east."
"I'll stand."
"As you like."
I stood at the foot of the steps with my hands at my sides.
I had thought about this for sixteen years, and in none of the versions had he been kind.
He was kind.
He looked at me with warm, tired, good-natured eyes, like a deacon about to say grace.
"You've done a fine thing, buying the Guidry paper," he said. "A lot of people in the county were worried. Wendell's not the man he was. It'll be a relief to see the dock in good hands."
"You're running the sale," I said.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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