Fated to My Cruel CEO novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Letters

Colt was still on the stairs when we came out of the study.

His phone lay dark on the step beside him.

"I didn't call," he said, without looking up.

Ansel stopped.

"Why not?"

"I don't know yet."

We left him there, and Florence locked the kitchen door behind us.

Back at the Riverside, Ansel set the shoebox on the table under the lamp.

He took off his jacket and rolled his sleeves.

"All of them," he said. "In order."

"It's past ten. There are sixty-one."

"Then you should sit down."

I took the armchair by the window and drew my knees up.

He opened the first envelope with a thumbnail, as carefully as if it were a bird.

For the first hour, nobody spoke.

He read the way he read contracts, very fast, and then he stopped reading like a contract.

By the tenth letter he was slowing down.

By the twentieth he had taken off his watch and laid it on the table.

It was as though time were something he no longer needed to keep.

I watched his face.

It did not show much.

But I saw his throat move over a line about a cat that died under the porch in the spring of my twelfth year.

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