My Mother Sold Me to Pay Her Dealer, and the Man Who Took Me From Him Has a Use for Me novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Chair

Valentine's POV

She came in at ten to six with snow on her shoulders and stood in the kitchen doorway with her coat still buttoned.

I was at the table.

I had been there since three, with a cup I had not drunk from and the gun not in pieces this time but put away, because I had stopped wanting to look at it.

"I need to tell you something," Bronwen said, "and you aren't going to believe it."

"Sit," I said.

"No."

She stayed in the doorway.

I understood that she had chosen it, the door at her back and the length of the room between us.

I put both hands flat on the wood.

"Then tell me from there," I said.

She told it plainly, in the voice she must have used to read a chart aloud to a doctor.

An old man in room six.

Thirty-one years behind my father's wheel.

It was the account the dying man had given her, and she did not change a word of it for me.

He stepped back one pace, she said, and put his hands in his pockets.

I heard her say it.

I heard the whole of it, and nothing in me moved.

Then she said, "The old man said your uncle cried so hard that the whole city saw," and the table was in front of me and I was looking at my own hands.

I had been nineteen on those steps.

I had gone down on my knees on the cold stone beside my father, and a man had put his arms around me from behind and held me, and said into my hair, I have you, Valentine, I have you, I have you.

For twelve winters he had held me.

He had sat at my right hand and told me to wait.

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