I Slept With My Enemy, Now He Won't Let Me Go novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Out the Front Door

Ansel looked at the phone in the harbormaster's hand.

Then at the hall.

Two hundred faces looked back at him, and not one of them was kind.

"It's a forgery," he said.

"Sit down, son," said the harbormaster.

"I won't be treated like this. I'm an Ashworth. I've given this yard eleven years."

"You've given it a lawyer and a lie," Winifred said.

She said it from her chair, and her voice carried to the back wall.

"Eleven percent of my husband's yard, bought quietly through a company that hides your name. A bank draft stamped with a seal that was never his to use. Forty thousand dollars offered to a man to shame a boy he hurt when they were both children."

"Aunt Winifred."

"I let you do it," she said. "That is my shame. I wanted to see how far you would go. I wanted to be wrong."

Ansel's mouth worked.

"I did everything for this family."

"You did everything for the chair."

"Because I deserve it!"

The shout rang off the rafters.

He heard himself, and the sound seemed to horrify him.

"I'm thirty-one years old," he said, quieter, shaking. "I've worked every day since I was sixteen. I sold every hull this yard built. He sat at a drafting table and drew pictures. And you gave him the lodge, the chair, the name, because you loved him more."

"I loved you both," Winifred said. "You made it a contest."

"He's not even."

He stopped.

The hall waited.

Neil rose to his feet, slowly, his hand on the table.

"Finish it," he said. "Not even what?"

Ansel stared at him.

For one second the old smile started back across his face, helpful and sweet.

Then it broke.

"A real man," he spat. "You're a freak, Neil. You're a lie in a suit. And you're about to run this harbor with your bastard in your lap."

Someone gasped.

Someone else said, "Oh, shut up," from the back, and a few people laughed, hard and ugly.

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