My Stranger Became My Stepbrother, Then Our Parents Divorced novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Your Sister

At the rehearsal dinner we shake hands like strangers, then he finds me in the boathouse and makes a rule.

Nils came down the steps and held out his hand.

"Annika," he said. "Welcome to the family."

I took it.

His palm was dry and warm, and I knew it, and I let go first.

"Nice to meet you," I said.

"Likewise."

His face had gone back to normal in the time it took to say it.

I hated how good he was at that.

My mother looked from one of us to the other and smiled, because she was happy and had no reason to look any harder.

Dinner was for twenty, at the long table.

Gunnar sat at the head with my mother on his right and me beside her, and Nils sat across from me, three chairs down, where I could see him if I looked up and could not if I didn't.

I did not look up.

"Birgit tells it better," Gunnar said, "but I'll tell it. We met at the Lutheran fish supper."

"The lutefisk," my mother said, laughing. "I was handing out the lefse, and Gunnar..."

"The second fish supper," Gunnar said.

"Was it?"

"The first one she was home with a cold. I had to come back." He patted her hand. "She forgets."

Everyone laughed.

My mother laughed too, a half second late, and put her fork down.

She did that all through the meal.

Gunnar finished her sentences and fixed the numbers in her stories, and each time she let him, and each time she looked a little smaller in her chair.

I watched it happen and hated it.

Across the table Nils was watching it too.

His jaw was tight.

He did not say anything, and neither did I.

After the dessert and the toasts, when the guests were drinking coffee in the front room, I went out the side door and down the lawn to the water.

The dock was stone, a long wet gray strip of it running out into Lake Superior, with a boathouse at the end and a wood-fired sauna beside it.

The lake was black.

The cold smelled like pine and ice.

I stood at the end of the dock with my arms around myself and tried to breathe.

I had slept with my stepbrother.

I had slept with him twice, and I had bitten him, and I had let him come inside me.

I heard boots on the stone behind me.

"Don't," I said.

"I'm not going to."

He stopped four feet away.

In the dark the scar looked even paler.

"You left a number," I said. "That's what you wanted to say."

"I wrote it on the pad."

"I didn't look at the pad."

He was quiet for a moment.

"I stayed in the lobby until noon," he said.

I turned my face away.

"Don't tell me that."

"I'm telling you because it stops tonight." His voice was flat. "My father has not been this happy in thirty years. He's sixty in the fall. I'm not going to be what ends it."

"I wasn't asking you to be anything."

"Good. Then here's the rule." He said it fast, and he had practiced it on the stairs. "We never met. Tomorrow I'm your brother and that's all I am. Nothing else, ever."

I laughed.

It came out wrong.

"You've got it all worked out," I said. "Does your father get a vote?"

"Don't be a smartass," he said.

"Don't be a coward," I said.

I stepped back and my heel went off the wet edge of the stone.

His hand shot out and closed around my arm above the elbow.

He pulled me in, and I stopped against his chest with his hand around the soft inside of my arm.

Neither of us moved.

His thumb lay on my skin where the sleeve had ridden up.

I felt it all the way down to my knees.

His breath was coming fast, though he had not run anywhere.

"It's cold," I said. "You're breathing like that because it's cold."

"Yes."

"If you break the rule you say so out loud," I said. "You don't get to do it and call it an accident."

"I won't break it."

His hand did not leave my arm.

I looked at his mouth, and then I made myself look at his eyes.

"You wrote your number down, Nils," I said. "For a man who doesn't know me."

His hand dropped.

"Good night, Annika."

"Good night, brother."

He walked back up the lawn without turning around.

I stayed on the dock until I couldn't feel my fingers.

My room was in the guest wing, at the end of a long cedar hall, with a view of the water I did not want.

I lay awake with the bedside lamp on.

I replayed his thumb on my arm over and over, and I hated how much I liked it.

In the morning there was an envelope under my door.

I opened it standing in my slip.

Inside, wrapped in a hotel napkin, was one small gold stud earring.

On the napkin, in a blunt engineer's hand, he had written: Rule stands. N.

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