Chapter 8: What the Pen Cost

Malachi's POV

I left her asleep with one arm flung across my pillow and her hair over her face.

I stood in the bedroom doorway for a full minute and told myself I could walk away from this.

I couldn't.

At six in the morning my phone rang. It was the nurse from my father's house.

"He's asking for you," she said. "He's saying whole words."

I drove up the bay road with the window down and the cold air on my face.

The nurse met me on the stairs and left us alone.

My father sat propped in a hospital bed by the window, in the cardigan he always wore. The blanket was tucked to his chest.

His eyes were pale and clear and fixed on me.

"Sit," he said.

It was a thick, slow word, and it was perfectly clear.

I sat.

"You," he said. He stopped and breathed. "Broke it."

"The deal."

"Four years." His good hand lifted off the blanket an inch and fell. "I kept my side. Not a day late."

"I know."

"You said she'd never see you."

"I know what I said."

I had said it in the back of his car, with a pen in my hand, and I had signed my name under it.

I had never told anyone what was on that page, and I had never once thought of breaking it.

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