The Canal Never Gives Anything Back

Name: The Canal Never Gives Anything Back
Author: Solène Réault

by Solène Réault

One foggy night, a bleeding stranger jumps into Mila's boat and gives her a key. The next day, a charming architect walks into her café with exactly the same face. She wonders which of them is lying to her; she should be wondering who taught them.

32 chapters 8 free Completed story

Romance Family secrets Thriller

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Mila Desart is thirty-three. She steers boats on the canals of Bruges, she left a wedding dress in its garment bag back in Namur, and she trusts water more than she trusts men. On winter Tuesday evenings she covers the boats at the Rozenhoedkaai on her own.

On 1 December, at a quarter past eleven, a man on the run falls into her boat, slices his hand open on her boathook and presses a brass key into her palm: “Don't give it to anyone. Not even to me.” Then he vanishes into the fog, calling her by her first name. She had never told him it.

The next day, a laughing architect walks into the café where she works. Same face, same eyes the colour of March water. But his right palm is unmarked. The day after that, a young man is pulled out of the Minnewater, the Lake of Love, with a strand of mustard-yellow wool caught under his watch strap: wool from the scarf she cut in two to bandage the stranger.

Two men, one face, and the whole of Bruges after that key. Which one do you love, when each of them has a reason to lie?

Contains explicit love scenes between adults and scenes of violence.

The Canal Never Gives Anything Back

Chapters

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