บททั้งหมดของ My Stepbrothers Are Triplets : บทที่ 11 - บทที่ 14

Mathilde woke up because the rooster was broken. Not broken. Wrong. It crowed at 4:47 a.m., then again at 4:52, then again at 4:58, like it had forgotten what it was supposed to be doing and was trying different approaches. She lay on the couch with a blanket pulled up to her chin, staring at the ceiling, counting the water stains. Seven. She'd counted them last night too. Still seven. The couch smelled like dust and mothballs and something underneath that she couldn't name. Old fabric. Old house. She turned her face into the cushion and breathed it in. It wasn't unpleasant. Just unfamiliar. Her back ached. The couch was too short. Her feet hung over the armrest. She'd slept in worse places—the floor of her mother's apartment during the winter the heat got cut off, the back seat of a borrowed car the week before she left for Paris—but her body didn't care about precedent. It just knew it hadn't slept well.

The sign took three days. Theo found paint in the shed—two cans, one white and one a faded blue that had gone thick at the top. He stirred it with a stick until his arm ached. He found a brush with half its bristles missing. He dragged the sign out to the porch and set it across two sawhorses and stood there looking at it for twenty minutes before he touched the brush to the wood. Caspian watched from the doorway. "You're going to ruin it." "It's already ruined. That's the point." Theo dipped the brush and made a line. It wobbled. He made another line. "It's called character." "It's called vandalism." "Same thing." Mathilde sat on the porch swing—the one with the crooked chain—and watched. The swing creaked when she moved. Creaked when she didn't. She'd learned to live with it. James came out with a mug of tea and sat on the step. The dog th