He Bought My Nights in the Dark, and I Hated Him by Day novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Note
Magnus Berge's men take Liv out of the net loft, and Astrid answers an email she once refused, makes the lawyer wire Berge before she walks into a pitch-black room, and lays a stranger's hand over her heart.
Magnus Berge's men carried my sister's duffel out of the net loft at six in the morning.
Liv walked down the steps between them without looking back.
She knew that if she looked at me, I would not let her go.
"She flies to Dutch Harbor on Friday," Berge said.
He stood in the doorway in a gray overcoat with a gold pin on the lapel, and he did not raise his voice.
He never did.
"Three years on my factory trawler. Her wages go against the note."
I stood in my apron with a netting needle still in my hand.
"The note was two hundred and forty thousand," I said.
"Then her engine blew off Kodiak, and her boat is a wreck in a Kodiak yard, and the note is three hundred and twelve."
"Those are fees you made up," I said.
"Those are fees she signed for," Berge said.
He looked around the loft at the racks of web, the cold woodstove and my grandfather's photograph on the wall.
"Pay me by five o'clock Thursday and I'll tear it up in front of you," he said.
"You can't. This place isn't worth half of it."
Outside, the van door slid shut on my sister's face.
I stood on the loft steps and watched it go out past the fuel dock.
Then I took out my phone and opened an email I had refused in April.
The subject line said: A client with unusual terms.
I read it with my thumb shaking.
An anonymous man would pay four hundred thousand dollars to a healthy woman for one year, or until she conceived, whichever came first.
Five nights a month, the nights a doctor circled on a calendar, in a room with no light.
I would never see him, and he would never see me.
No names.
I called the number before the van reached the bridge.
The lawyer was a woman in her fifties in Pioneer Square.
At noon she read me the terms across her desk without once looking at my face.
"Questions?" she said.
"Who is he?" I asked.
"I don't know. I draw up the terms. I never meet him."
"What if he's a monster?"
"Then the door of the room opens from your side," she said. "It does not lock. You can walk out any night."
I had one more thing to ask, and I asked it before I could get afraid.
"My sister owes a man named Berge three hundred and twelve thousand dollars."
"It goes to him today, when I sign. Not after the first night."
"That is not how the agency pays," the lawyer said.
"Then call your client and tell him that is how I am."
She took her phone into the next room and shut the door.
I sat with my hands under my thighs so she would not see them.
She came back and sat down slowly.
"He says yes," she said. "He says he should have thought of it himself."
I signed on the line she showed me.
She wired the money to Berge Fisheries while I watched her screen, and the confirmation came up in green.
By two o'clock, Liv's flight on Friday did not exist anymore.
At nine that night a driver walked me down a dock on Lake Union in the rain.
The floating homes sat dark on both sides, and somewhere behind us a bridge bell rang and a horn answered it.
He stopped at a narrow stair that led below the deck of the last house.
"The lights go out on a timer," he said. "He comes in after."
He nodded at the door on the left.
"If you want to leave, that is the way, and it is never locked."
I went down alone.
The cabin had a bed, a low table and a heater ticking, and a lamp on the table with a plain white shade.
I looked at all of it carefully, because it was the last time I would see anything in that room.
The lamp went out.
There was no window, no crack under the door and no gray in the corner.
It was black all the way to the walls.
I heard the door open and close behind me, and I heard him breathe.
He did not speak.
A hand found my wrist.
It was warm and hard, and it did not grip.
His thumb settled on the inside of my wrist where the pulse is and stayed there, counting, while the blood slammed against it.
I was a net mender, and I had spent my whole life learning to hold still while something pulled.
I did not hold still now.
I took his hand off my wrist and laid it flat over my heart.
Then I stepped toward the sound of his breathing.
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