His palm was enormous and warm. His scars were rough against my skin.
“I don’t deserve you,” he said.
“That’s not up to you,” I answered.
He stared at our joined hands as though he had never seen anything so strange.
I should have been afraid. I should have pulled away.
Instead I realized, with a jolt that nearly stopped my breath, that I didn’t want to.
I was falling in love with my husband.
The Monster. The Pig.
The man everyone in the city feared and mocked.
And I didn’t care about the scars, or the size, or the wheelchair.
I only cared about the sound of his voice at midnight, and the way his eyes softened when I walked into a room.
But there was something I didn’t understand, something that nagged at me.
Sometimes, in the moments when he thought I wasn’t watching, I would catch Don Baste looking at me with a strange intensity, as though he were weighing something. As though he were holding his breath.
As though he were waiting for a verdict.
