He Kissed My Sister on the Day I Was Forced to Wed novel · Chapter 23 of 24
Chapter 23: The Wharf Bell
The bell rang a dozen times.
The old man sat through every one of them with his hands folded on the ledger.
Roan stood in front of the desk and did not move.
"Who is ringing that?" he said, when the last note died.
"Your foreman," said the old man. "I told him at dawn to ring it when the envelope came through my door."
"That bell is for..."
"It is rung once in a Draper's life.
"My father rang it for me, in nineteen sixty-eight.
"I had hoped to be in better health when I rang it for you."
Roan stared at him.
The old man opened a drawer.
He took out a stiff cream page with a bank's seal at the top and laid it on the blotter.
I stepped closer to read it.
It was a promissory note, two million, eight hundred thousand dollars, in Roan's black signature at the bottom.
Across the middle, someone had stamped PAID in red ink.
PAID.
Under it was a date.
I read the date twice before I understood it.
It was the Monday night Roan had signed.
"You stamped it that night," Roan said. His voice was very low. "Before I'd paid a dollar."
"I stamped it at ten past nine, while you walked out of this room with your back straight."
"You told me to carry it. Every dollar of it."
"I told you to carry it without a dollar from me," said the old man. "I have not given you one.
"I took nothing, and I wrote it off.
"The paper is not worth the ink."
"Why?"
"Because I wanted to see," the old man said, "whether you would sign a note like that for a girl you'd known three days.
"And whether your brothers would sell their bars and their trucks and their restaurants to pay a debt that I'd already forgiven.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of He Kissed My Sister on the Day I Was Forced to Wed are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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