He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me novel · Chapter 7 of 24
Chapter 7: Counting
Cal's POV
I walked out of the kitchen and down into the garage, because it was the only room in the house where I could close a door.
The door had no lock.
It closed anyway, and I stood with my back against it in the dark.
The air smelled of cold concrete and motor oil.
Boy, bus, 600.
I had read that line forty times since six that morning.
For sixteen years I had known that somebody paid for me.
I had never seen the figure.
Six hundred dollars.
My mother's rent had been four hundred and ten.
I put my fist against the wall and did not hit it.
I had not hit a wall since I was seventeen, on a beach, with sand in my mouth and a scar I couldn't explain.
The kitchen door opened behind me.
I did not turn around.
"I'm not going to apologize," Jo said.
Her voice came from the top of the three steps, low and steady.
"I'm not asking you to," I said.
"I came to say I didn't know," she said. "About the line. About you."
"You said that."
"I'm saying it again where you can see my face."
I turned.
She stood in the doorway in my torn shirt with her braid half undone and her bare feet on the cold step.
The light behind her made a halo of the loose hair.
Her chin was up.
She was shaking, and she was not going to let me see it.
I had hated a girl on a dock for sixteen years.
I did not know what to do with the woman in front of me.
She had been sending money to forty-one strangers since she was fourteen, out of an account her father believed was his.
"A girl in a church dress with a book," I said. "That's what I carried. All this time."
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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