He Demanded I Deny His Daughter, So I Walked Away novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: One Week

Silvan takes Rochelle to his boatyard with a one-week rule. Poppy phones from the Sanborn house line and is cut off mid-word, and Silvan realizes Adelaide let the call through to learn where Rochelle went.

I got into the truck with my dress bunched on my lap and gravel still stuck to my bare foot.

Silvan pulled away from the gate before I had the door shut.

Behind us a hundred and forty people were probably standing up from their white chairs.

"Turn around," I said. "Please. I have to get Poppy."

"No."

"She's six. She's standing on that lawn crying for me."

"And Rhett has his hand on her," Silvan said. "If you walk back through that gate in that dress, his mother has the police there in four minutes."

His eyes stayed on the road.

"You'd have a fight on your hands, and she'd watch it."

I hated that he was right.

I pressed my fist against my mouth until I could breathe through my nose.

"Why were you standing at the back?" I asked.

"I wanted to see what you'd do."

"You wanted to see if I'd sign."

"Yes."

"Did you think I would?"

He took a long time to answer.

"Lila said you wouldn't," he said at last. "I didn't believe her."

I turned and looked out the window.

We drove along the water for twenty minutes without a word.

His boatyard sat at the end of a gravel road on the Sound, a long gray shop with a house built on top of it.

Inside it smelled of cedar and varnish.

A wooden hull stood on blocks in the middle of the floor with half its planks off, and the lights were still on over it.

"Upstairs," Silvan said.

The house was one big room with a kitchen at one end and a bed at the other, and a door beside the bed that he opened with his shoulder.

"The loft. It has a lock and a bathroom."

"I can't pay you."

"I didn't ask."

He took a gray sweatshirt and a pair of drawstring pants from a shelf and held them out without looking at my dress.

"One week," he said. "Then you find your own place."

"That's your rule?"

"That's my rule."

"Fine."

I changed in the loft with my back to the door.

It took me six minutes to find every hook on the back of the dress, and my hands shook through all of it.

When I came out, I was wearing his clothes and the pants dragged on the floor.

Silvan was at the counter making coffee.

My phone was still in the bridal suite. So was my purse, my keys and the picture of Poppy's first day of kindergarten.

I didn't have one number memorized except my own.

"Can I use yours?" I asked. "I'll call the school. They'll tell me she's all right."

"It's Saturday."

"Then I'll call Rhett."

"And say what?"

"That he can have the ring back and I want her Monday for pickup."

Silvan set a mug in front of me.

"He'll say yes to anything today," he said. "It means nothing. He says yes to whoever is in the room."

His phone buzzed on the counter, and he turned it over.

I read the screen upside down.

Rhett had written: "Bring her back by Monday and we'll forget this. Mom says she's forgiven."

Forgiven.

I laughed once, a short ugly sound, and I couldn't stop looking at that word.

"Don't answer him," I said.

"I wasn't going to."

He picked up the phone and set it down again.

It rang in his hand.

The caller was the Sanborn house.

Silvan frowned and answered.

"Uncle Silvan?"

I knew the voice before he could say a word.

I was around the counter and had the phone against my ear before he could stop me.

"Poppy?"

"Rochelle!"

She was whispering, and her breath was catching.

"I'm in Grandma's office. I used her phone. Is it real, did you really leave? Grandma said you were gone forev"

The line clicked.

It didn't drop.

It was cut off in the middle of a word, and I heard a second set of footsteps before the click.

I stood there holding the phone.

Silvan took it gently out of my fingers and looked at the screen.

Then he looked at me.

"That's the house line," he said. "Adelaide let her dial it."

"Why would she do that?"

"To find out where you went," Silvan said. "Now she knows."

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