The Seventh Time novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Farmhouse

Pete confesses what Broderick paid him; Romy decides to sell her grandmother's farmhouse and pay the note herself, and Killian is waiting in the kitchen to say he slept with Delphine of his own free will.

"Fifteen thousand dollars," Pete said. "Each time you went back to him."

I sat down on a stack of paper boxes.

"He called it a retention bonus. He said it was for keeping the family steady."

"And you kept it."

"I kept the lights on." Pete dragged his hands down his face. "Two winters ago the compressor on bay four died, and I paid for it with his money. The year before that it was the roof. Romy, every time you came back, I thought, good, it's a lovers' fight, it's a rich man's game. Nobody gets hurt."

"I got hurt."

"I know."

"Six times, Pete. I stood in my kitchen with my phone in my hand."

"I know." He finally sank down on the edge of his desk. "I told myself you'd have said no if it was bad. You kept saying yes."

That stung because it was fair.

I had said yes, and nobody had locked me in a room.

I had said yes because I loved Killian, and because forty people ate off this floor, and because Broderick had never once told me to my face that I had to.

He only ever let me work it out.

I looked at my brother's tired, bearded face, and I did not have it in me to be cruel to him.

I was too busy being clear.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?"

"You took money. I'm angry. We'll be angry later." I stood up. "Right now I need to know what the note costs."

"One million, four hundred and ninety thousand, with interest, by the thirtieth."

"Then I'm selling the farmhouse."

Pete stared at me.

"Romy, no."

"It's mine. Grandma left it to me alone, and you know what it's worth."

"It's the only place you've ever been happy."

"It's a house," I said. "I'd rather have forty paychecks and a clean conscience."

I said it lightly.

He knew me too well to be fooled.

"She'd want it to go to someone who'd love it," he said quietly.

"Then I'll find someone who will."

Tara drove us out to Medina that afternoon in her ancient blue Subaru, with Dennis the cat yowling from a carrier in the back seat.

"I'm not leaving him alone with that couch," she said when I looked at the carrier. "He'll shred it out of grief."

"You don't own a couch worth shredding."

"He doesn't know that."

The farmhouse sat at the end of a gravel drive, white clapboard with a green door, between two fields of cut corn.

My grandmother had grown peonies along the porch rail.

Now the stalks were brown and the porch boards were wet from the morning rain.

I stood in the yard with the key in my hand and could not make my feet go up the steps.

"You don't have to do this today," Tara said.

"If I wait a day, I'll talk myself out of it."

"Would that be so terrible?"

"I'd end up on Broderick's doorstep with a casserole."

She snorted and took my elbow.

"Come on. I'll make tea. I'll make bad tea, and you'll complain, and it'll be like college."

The door was already unlocked.

I noticed it with the part of my mind that was still functioning.

The latch gave under my hand, and a cold, sweet smell met us, apples and old wood.

Someone had lit the stove.

Someone was standing at the kitchen table with his back to the window, in a dark coat, with his hands flat on the wood.

Killian.

Tara went absolutely rigid beside me.

"No," she said. "Absolutely not. Dennis, stay."

Killian didn't look at her.

He had not slept, and he had not shaved.

There was a razor nick on his jaw, and his tie was in his coat pocket.

"You still gave me a key," he said. "I never gave it back."

"Get out of my grandmother's kitchen."

"I will. I will, Romy, I swear. But I need to say one thing before I do, and I need you to hear it from me and not from her."

"Delphine said it for you. In front of forty people."

"She said what she knew." His voice cracked on the last word. "She doesn't know why."

"I don't care why."

"I slept with her."

The stove ticked in the quiet.

Tara reached out and took the cat carrier from the floor, very slowly, and stepped backward onto the porch.

I stood there, the key biting into my palm.

"I did it myself," Killian said. "Nobody told me to. Nobody asked me to. I want you to know that before you spend a minute thinking it was my father."

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