Rule One Said I Was the Only Person Awake After Midnight, but My Mother Never Sleeps novel · Chapter 23 of 24
Chapter 23: Checkout
I put the card in my cardigan pocket with the desk keys and left it there all morning.
The cook made the Ice-Out Breakfast anyway, because sixty people had walked a mile for it.
There were pancakes and sausage and coffee in the big urns on the porch.
The town ate standing up, in the sun, looking at the lake.
Nobody said much.
The families came for their people one at a time.
The nephew from Lake Placid loaded the woman in 210's suitcases into his car.
Then she came back up the steps and found me at the desk.
She reached into her knitting bag and took out a pipe.
It was the doctor's pipe, the one he'd left on the porch swing at six in the morning on my first night.
"I picked it up that afternoon," she said. "I thought somebody ought to keep it for him."
"Why didn't you give it back?"
"I didn't know which one to give it to." She put it on the desk. "You do it."
She patted my cheek with her cold dry hand and went down the steps to her nephew's car without looking back.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of Rule One Said I Was the Only Person Awake After Midnight, but My Mother Never Sleeps are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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