My Substitute Wife Is Not on the Return Manifest novel · Chapter 9 of 24
Chapter 9: Terms
Signe could not sleep, so at eleven she went back to the chart room and started clearing her desk.
Julie had driven her home and made her eat toast and sit in a hot bath.
Then Julie had gone to bed on the couch, snoring, and the storm rule had sent Signe out into the dark.
Nobody should sleep alone on a storm night.
She did not know where to go to keep it, so she went to work.
She was wrapping her calipers in a towel when the door opened.
Dane stood there with a folded page in one hand.
He did not tilt his head, and he did not tap his watch.
"I have to tell you something," he said, "and I want to say all of it before you answer."
She put the calipers down.
"Go on."
He told her in order.
He stood in the middle of the room and told it flatly, without once looking away, and it took a long time.
When he reached the part about the hangar light, she sat down on a stool.
When he reached the cutter's deck, she covered her mouth.
He finished with the tag.
"He gave it to me with his own hand," Dane said. "I've carried it since."
The room's one lamp lit the big map table between them.
Signe turned the whole thing over, and the pieces fell into place so fast that she was almost angry.
"You weren't with her because you loved her," she said.
"I was with her because I promised."
"And me?"
"You were the one thing in my life I hadn't promised anybody."
"For three years I thought you were being kind to a stand-in." She heard her own voice shake. "I thought every time you held me in a storm you were holding the girl who ran. I made myself small so I wouldn't be in the way of it."
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