My Brother Left Me With the Man He Told Me to Stay Away From, and Then Didn't Come Back novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Before the Feast

Laz's POV

I did not sleep the night before the feast.

At two I got up from the iron bed so as not to wake her.

I drove to the docks and walked out along the planks in the dark with my bandaged arm held against my chest.

The long table was already set.

It ran the length of the sponge dock, two hundred places.

White paper lay on the boards where the cloth would go, and a folded chair stood at every setting.

The Eleni S. lay at her mooring beyond it, and I went aboard and stood at the rail.

The water was black and quiet.

In a few hours every Stavrakis who had ever owed my family a debt or a favor would sit at that table.

So would the priest.

The police officer would be there, and the old men from the kafeneio, and Spiros at the head.

And Thalia would stand up in front of them with a manila envelope and say a name.

I had held a hundred meetings in my life.

I had sent men to prison and men out of town.

I had sat in the same room as a man who had threatened to burn my house.

I'd never once had a pulse in my throat.

Now I stood at a rail at two in the morning with the skin of my arm tight and burning under the gauze.

My hands were not steady.

I had to hold the rail with the good one.

I could not stand beside her.

I could not lift a hand.

I would be a man in a crowd, behind a woman, watching her stand in front of my uncle.

It was exactly what I had stood at a gate in a borrowed suit and not done at nineteen.

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