Page 13 of My Girl to Take

I don’t answer, because he’s right. I’ve been on both ends of that transaction my entire adult life. Money is never money. It’s a claim, a lien, a thing you’re buying an option on. The only variable is how long it takes the other man to name his price.

He puts the envelope in his back pocket. “Boiler’s twenty-six years old,” he says and picks the chisel back up.

That’s it. No thanks, no questions. I get halfway down the stairs before it occurs to me that he’s the first person in seventeen years who’s taken something from me and not started calculating what he owes.

I don’t know how to feel about that.

***

The apartment is four hundred square feet, and I’ve been in it eleven days.

My bag still isn’t unpacked. There’s a suit on the back of the bathroom door, three shirts over a chair, and a laptop on a table that came with the room. That’s the entirety of my presence here. I could be gone in nine minutes. I’ve timed it, not on purpose.

That’s the arrangement. A room where nobody can find me, for as long as it takes to establish what’s happening to my father. Then a flight, and back to my life exactly as it was.

I’ve been back to that house four times in eleven days.

The refusal is still sitting in my chest, three days old. Take it. Just until I’m stable. Seventeen years, and the first thing he asks me for is the thing he took away.

I said no because it was the true answer.

I’ve been saying it to myself since Tuesday like a mantra.

***

There’s a knock on my door at four in the afternoon, and I know who it is before I open it. Only Jax has this address, and Jax texts. He doesn’t drop by.

Kiera.

She’s come straight from the office. Tailored trousers, cream blouse, heels, the whole apparatus, standing in a hallway with a water stain on the ceiling and looking exactly like what she is—the only person in this building with somewhere to be.

I’m in a T-shirt, fresh off a set of punishing plank and crunch exercises, and I haven’t shaved in three days.

Her eyes come up. Then down.

They stay down, but I see a flush start creeping across her chest.

“See something you like?”

Her gaze snaps back to my face, and the color goes straight up her throat. “I…no. I mean—”

I let her hang there. It’s the most enjoyable thing that’s happened to me all week.

“What are you doing here, Kiera?”

I step back to let her in without waiting for the answer, and she goes past me too quickly, too aware of the space. I watch her clock the room—the bag, the three shirts, the fact that nothing in here belongs to me.

“I came to talk to you,” she says, turning as the door shuts.

“About?”

“Your father.”

That takes the amusement out of it.

“Sit.”

She sits.