The Life I Chose novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: Twenty-Two Weeks

Daniel stopped on the dock with his bag on his shoulder.

He didn't put it down.

"Holt," he said. "It's five in the morning."

"I know what time it is." Holt's breath smoked in the floodlights. "I've been here since three. Your mother's neighbor told me where you work. Nice lady. Very chatty."

I got out of the truck.

Daniel had said stay in it.

I didn't.

The three men on the orange pilot boat had stopped what they were doing.

One of them had a coil of line in his hands and didn't put it down either.

"She had a fitting," Holt said. "My fiancée. A dress. A church. Her mother loved me. And your girlfriend walked in and blew it up in front of a seamstress."

"Your fiancée read your texts," Daniel said. "That's all."

"You don't get to talk about my family."

"I didn't. I've barely said a word about your family. I don't need to. You do it for me."

Holt saw me then, by the truck.

His mouth twisted.

"There she is. Did she tell you what she is? My mother found her in a restaurant. A cook's kid from Pawtucket with nothing. We gave her Christmas. We gave her a ring. And she climbed straight out of my bed into a fisherman's."

"You climbed out of mine into your sister's," I said. "Two hours after you proposed."

One of the boat crew said, "Jesus Christ," under his breath.

Holt swung.

He swung at Daniel, not at me, a big wild punch from too far away.

Daniel stepped back half a pace.

The fist went past his chin and Holt's whole weight went with it.

Daniel caught his wrist on the way by and turned it, not hard, just enough.

Holt went down on one knee on the wet planks with his arm up behind him.

"Don't," Daniel said quietly. "You'll go in the water. It's forty-eight degrees."

The man with the coil of line had come up the ramp.

So had the other two.

"Want us to call the harbor police, Cap?"

"Yes," I said.

"Let him go first," Daniel said.

He let go.

Holt got up slowly with his good overcoat soaked black at the knee.

He looked at the three men.

He looked at me.

Nobody here knew his father.

Nobody here had been to his engagement party.

He was just a man in a wet coat who had swung at a pilot on a dock and missed.

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