My Alpha Stepbrother Called Me a Gold Digger, So I Bought His Father's Note novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Soren's POV: The Road

Soren's POV

I resigned from the co-op on Monday at seven in the morning.

I put the letter on the board chair's desk, and Kjell Sundby read it with his pink hands folded and his pink face arranged in sorrow.

"Son," he said.

"This is hasty."

"I'm thirty," I said.

"And I'm not your son."

I put the elevator keys on the blotter.

I put the cash box beside them, the gray tin one, empty.

I had been paying the Friday crew out of my own account for six years because the pack's checking had been dry since before I took the job.

I had told myself it was pride.

It was shame, and I had not known it.

I drove up the hill to the Ness place and went into my grandmother's cottage.

She sat in the rocker with a cat on her knee.

She looked at the keys in my hand and the way I was standing, and she said, "Well."

"I resigned," I said.

"I gave them to Kjell.

"I'd like to give you the other set."

I set them on her table.

They were the keys to the bunkhouse, the pack's trucks, the seed shed and the grain office safe.

She looked at them for a long time.

"She said not yet," Dagny said.

"I heard what she said."

"And you're sulking."

"I'm not," I said.

"I'm paying."

Dagny's mouth did something I hadn't seen in years.

"Go on, then," she said.

"I'll watch."

That week I sold my truck.

I took the Silverado to the dealer in Havre and walked out with nine thousand dollars and a bus ticket, and I paid a neighbor forty dollars to drive me home.

I took my father's elk-skull mount down off the wall of the hall.

My father had shot that elk the year I was born, and it had hung over the stairs for thirty years.

A collector in Great Falls gave me twenty-two hundred.

My father saw the empty nail and said nothing.

He put his hand on my shoulder, and I felt it shake.

I took night work on a neighbor's potato harvest, in the dark, with a headlamp and a fork.

By Thursday I had sixty-one hundred dollars in a bank envelope and a pair of hands that wouldn't close.

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