They Threw Me Away at Twelve, So I Came Home Undefeated novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Safe

They put me back in my old bedroom at four in the morning, and the bolt slid home again.

I did not sleep.

At eight, the bolt slid back, and the housekeeper stood in the door with a tray.

"Your grandmother wants you," she said.

She said it flatly, and she did not meet my eyes.

I think she had been told to say it.

Rhett walked me to the east wing himself.

He kept one hand on my back the whole way, and the bruise on his forehead had gone purple.

"Enjoy it," he said at the white doors. "You've got five minutes."

My grandmother sat upright in her chair beside the window, with the oxygen tube under her nose and a blanket across her knees.

The nurse stood against the wall with her hands folded.

"Leave us," my grandmother said.

"Mr. Thornquist said..."

"Mr. Thornquist's mother says leave us."

The nurse went.

I told her everything, in a rush, standing in the middle of her carpet.

The cage, and the ledger, and Dutch in handcuffs.

The three years of men falling down on purpose.

Perry.

She listened without moving, and when I finished she was quiet for a long time.

"So that is what my money bought," she said.

"I'm so sorry. I didn't know."

"You have nothing to be sorry for." Her eyes were bright and hard. "I gave a boy forty thousand dollars and told him not to say why. He kept his word. I should have known there was only one thing he could want that badly."

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