Left in the Sand, Found by the Sea novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Nine Years

Eli's POV

I called him back from the outside stairs, at one in the morning, with Orla asleep behind the door.

The phone rang once.

"Dario," my father said.

Nobody had said that name to me in nine years.

It was still mine, and I hated how fast my shoulders went tight at the sound of it.

"Don't call me that."

"It's your name."

"It was on a stone. You paid for it."

He let that go without a word, the way he let everything go that he planned to settle later.

"The girl is yours," he said.

"She isn't anyone's."

"She is Rocco's girl, and she is sleeping with you in that room above the ferry shed. Bianca sent me the photograph. I recognized the staircase."

"You've had a picture of my staircase?"

"For nine years, Dario. Did you think I would let you go and not know where?"

I stood very still with my hand on the rail.

Below me, the harbor slapped at the pilings.

All those years, I had believed he had let me go.

I had believed that was the one decent thing he had done.

"Why are you calling?" I said.

"Because your brother knows where she is."

"Rocco doesn't know I'm alive."

"No. He knows only that the girl is in Gannet Cove, because the driver told him this afternoon, and I forbade him the road. He has spent six hours telling me that I cannot." My father's voice was flat and tired. "He's not a boy who takes a no. You should remember. You raised him."

"I raised him for eight years."

"And then you left."

"You told him I drowned."

"You wanted to go. I gave you the cleanest way to do it."

"You gave me a funeral so you wouldn't have to say your heir walked out the door."

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