He Chose the Girl Who Tried to Kill Him novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Draft in the Stove

Nan slept in the chair with the quilt up to her chin, and Tobias bound her feet with strips torn from a clean shirt.

He worked carefully, one foot in his lap at a time.

I watched his hands and could not stop watching them.

An hour before, those hands had been on me.

Now they were wrapping a laundress's daughter's heels, and I was jealous of a bandage.

I did not say so.

I stood at the window with my arms wrapped around myself and said something worse.

"Say it, then."

He glanced up.

"Say what?"

"That you'll be rid of me now. I'm a Severance, and the Severances did it. I can't be any use to you."

"Adaline."

"You hate the name Haldane, and my father is about to make me one. You've hated me since the church, I think, and you were polite about it."

I was surprised at how steady I sounded.

"I'd rather hear it from you than from a man at a bank," I said.

Tobias tied off the bandage and set Nan's foot down on the rug.

He did not answer.

He crossed to the long worktable, which still had ink dried across one corner of it, and pulled open the bottom drawer.

Under a stack of foolscap there was a flat envelope with a lawyer's stamp on the flap.

He brought it to the window and put it in my hand.

Inside was a bank draft for ten thousand dollars, made out to him, signed H. Haldane.

"Last April," he said. "Her lawyer came up my stairs with it. I was to take the money and live in another city, and not come to my brother's wedding."

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