Married to My Ex's Uncle novel · Chapter 5 of 32
Chapter 5: Cedar
On Thursday afternoon Greta stood at the counter of the post office in Sister Bay with a padded envelope.
Inside it was the sandwich bag, sealed in a second bag, with a form from a private lab in Milwaukee.
"Overnight?" the clerk said.
"Overnight."
It cost more than she'd paid herself that week.
That night she couldn't sleep.
The loft had a wall of beadboard down the middle now, and a door Lukas had hung on Tuesday with new hinges.
Her side had her mattress, her lamp and her father's old sea chest.
His side had a narrow cot and a shelf of books.
At eleven she gave up and went down the ladder in her sweatshirt and socks.
The light was on in the shop.
Lukas was at the half-planked hull with a block plane, shaving the edge of a cedar strake.
The dog was asleep under the sawhorses.
He looked up.
"Nerves?" he said.
"I'm marrying a priest tomorrow. I think I'm allowed."
"Former."
"That's what I want to ask about."
He set the plane down.
She came and stood across the hull from him, with the ribs and the fresh planks between them.
"Margit told me to ask you why you left the church," she said. "So I'm asking."
He was quiet for a while.
He ran his thumb along the plank he'd been shaping.
"Two reasons," he said. "The first one's easy to say. I stopped being able to forgive people."
"That sounds like a job requirement."
"It is." The corner of his mouth moved. "I'd sit in that box and hear what people did, and say the words, and send them home light. And then I'd watch them do it again. I couldn't keep handing it out like candy at a parade."
"And the second one?"
He looked down at the plank.
"I fell in love with a woman I had no right to," he said.
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