Banished at Dad's Wake, So I Came Back to Run the Boardwalk novel · Chapter 13 of 24
Chapter 13: The Lifeguard Stand
Asher's POV
I took her north along the water line, because north was the only direction without a blanket on it.
She carried her sandals in one hand and did not say a word.
Behind us the barge kept firing, and every burst threw our shadows out long across the wet sand.
The red dress went gold, then green, then white.
She walked a step ahead of me, and I let her.
I had rehearsed this conversation for ten years, in forty hotel rooms and one long drive across Nevada.
In every version she was cold and I was calm.
I was not calm.
Past the last of the families the beach went empty and the dunes began.
A lifeguard stand stood up out of the sand there, a white wooden tower with a ladder and a bench on top.
Nicki stopped under it and turned around.
"Say it," she said. "All of it. You don't get to hand me half a story at a time."
"They asked for the pier," I said. "Your uncle said it in front of me, and Malachy sat there with his hands on his knees."
"And you stood up."
"I stood up because nobody else was going to."
"I put the ring down because it was the only thing in the room Silvio could not argue with," I said.
"You were twenty-six."
"I was twenty-six and I had a chair I did not know how to sit in."
She was breathing hard, and the fireworks lit her face in pieces.
"Why didn't you tell me?" she said. "At the club. On the terrace. In your bed, for five weeks."
"Because the first time you saw me, you were looking for a reason to hate me," I said.
"And I gave you one."
"And I thought, if she knows, she will owe me," I said. "And a woman who owes a man will say yes out of owing."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of Banished at Dad's Wake, So I Came Back to Run the Boardwalk are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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