Chapter 18: The Petition

Joost's POV

I followed the prospect's truck down Route 31 with my son's face burning in my head.

He had Femke's mouth and her stubborn chin.

He had my eyes and my crooked ear, and he had stood against her leg with a green crayon and asked who I was.

I had run a club for three years, and I had never felt my hands go this cold on a throttle.

The Pine Motel was a low strip of twelve rooms with a vacancy sign missing its V.

A black sedan sat in front of number six.

The man in the gray overcoat stood beside it with a leather folder under his arm and a polite smile on his face.

I put the kickstand down and walked across the lot.

I did not hurry.

Three years at the head of that table had taught me that hurrying is how you lose a room.

"Mr. Verwey," the lawyer said. "I'm glad you came."

"I'll bet."

"We have a good deal to discuss."

"We have one thing to discuss." I stopped a yard from him. "Where's Sanne?"

The door of number six opened.

She stood in it with the little girl on her hip.

Sanne had gotten thinner, and the hand holding her daughter was red and chapped, a hand that washed things for a living now.

The girl was three and a half, with a ponytail and a stuffed rabbit and Pieter's gray eyes.

She stared at me over her mother's shoulder and said nothing.

"Joost," Sanne said.

"You stopped the rent on the duplex," I said. "I'm told you're living out of a car."

"You stopped the rent."

"I stopped it in October, when your lawyer asked me to sign that my father's girl was mine."

"She is your sister," Sanne said. "You won't even say it."

"I said it at my own table, to forty men. I'll say it again."

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Made Her His Old Lady. I Took His Baby and Vanished from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.