He Left My Fever for His Ex, So I Took Our Daughter novel · Chapter 13 of 24
Chapter 13: Say It Out Loud
"Then I can't," Tobin said.
His voice cracked on it.
"My mother has that farm because my father worked himself into the ground for it, and I'm not the one who loses it."
"So you'll let Ingrid sell Pier Nine instead," Joel said.
"I don't know what else to do."
Joel took one step toward him, and I put a hand flat on Joel's chest.
Tobin's phone rang in his lap.
He looked at the screen and went white.
"It's my mother."
"Answer it," I said.
"She doesn't call. She hates phones."
"Tobin, answer it."
He put it on speaker with a shaking thumb.
"Tobin Halvorsen." The voice was dry and flat and came from a long way off. "Are you at that pier?"
"Mom, I'm in the middle of something."
"I know where you are. I'm at the gate. Tell these boys in the vests to let my truck through."
Nobody on the bench said a word.
Joel was already walking.
We followed him around the dock office and out to the gravel, where thirty dockworkers stood across the entrance and a small gray woman in a barn coat stood in front of them with a casserole dish.
She had driven fifty miles in a truck older than I was.
The crew parted for her, one by one, without being asked.
She walked straight past Joel and me and stopped in front of her son.
She looked at his unshaved face and his missing coat, and she set the dish on the hood of the deputy's car.
"Ingrid's lawyer mailed me a paper last month," she said. "It says if you ever cross her, she calls the loan and takes the farm."
Tobin's mouth opened.
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