He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me novel · Chapter 19 of 24
Chapter 19: The Note Torn
The county meeting lasted forty minutes and I remember almost none of it.
It was held in a long paneled room on the second floor of the courthouse.
A flag stood in the corner, and there were folding chairs for the public.
Cal and I sat in the third row.
He wore the grey suit, and I wore my one good dress, navy, bought for my grandmother's funeral.
His hand lay on his own knee, six inches from mine, and neither of us moved it.
On the dais, behind a long table with a nameplate, sat five commissioners and a clerk.
The man in the center chair was sixty-two, big and soft and pink.
He had a white crest of hair and a tie pin shaped like an anchor.
He was smiling.
He had a pleasant voice, warm and slow, and he used it like a man who had never been refused a thing.
I knew him.
I had known him since I was six.
He was the one who had picked me up at the Christmas party.
He had called me "Princess Josephine" and put a silver dollar in my hand.
"Item nine," he said, in that voice. "The notice of sale of the Guidry Seafood dock and appurtenances on Shell Belt Road, Bayou La Batre. Foreclosure auction, by order of the bankruptcy trustee. The county is happy to host."
Cal had not moved.
I turned my head very slightly.
He was looking at the man on the dais with no expression at all.
It was the face he had worn in the courthouse hallway, the one he used when he counted.
"Friend of the Guidry family," the commissioner said into his microphone.
"I've known Wendell thirty years. It grieves me. But the law's the law, and I'm told the sale's been put forward on account of this weather. Saturday noon. At the dock. All welcome."
He smiled out at the room.
His eyes passed over the third row and did not catch on either of us.
They moved on.
Under the pew, Cal's hand had closed on the edge of the folding chair.
I watched the knuckles.
I put my hand over his.
He did not look at me.
But he turned his palm up, slowly, and laced his fingers through mine, and gripped so hard I felt the bones shift.
"Not here," I said, under my breath.
"No," he said. "Not here."
We sat through the rest of the meeting like two people holding the same rope.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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