My Brother Left Me With the Man He Told Me to Stay Away From, and Then Didn't Come Back novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Eight Hundred Ninety-Three

Dinner was roast chicken and rice and a silence you could have cut with the bread knife.

Despina sat down for it.

In all the weeks I had been in her house, she had never once sat down to a meal she cooked.

She sat at the head of her own small table with her hands folded, and she looked at the two of us in turn.

I had washed my face.

I had not been able to do anything about my hair, or the seam of my underwear that was now in Laz's study wastebasket, or the way my legs felt.

Laz sat across from me with a buttoned collar.

It did not quite cover the bite I had left under his ear.

He cut his chicken into very small pieces and did not eat them.

"Thalia, the lemon," Despina said.

I passed the lemon.

My hand shook, and she watched it shake.

"Eat," she said.

I ate.

It was very good chicken, and I tasted none of it.

Under the table, Laz's foot touched mine.

It was an accident, or it was not.

He moved it away at once, and I felt the missing place all through dinner.

I thought about his palm over my mouth.

I thought about the purple half-moons I had left in the heel of his hand, and how he had held that hand in his lap through the whole meal, turned up, like something he did not want to put down.

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