He Cheated With His Ex, So the Club President Claimed Me novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Thirty-Two

Gage's POV

I had written thirty-one letters in three years, and I couldn't write one line in the ash.

She sat on the stump beside me with the green notebook open on her knee, holding the pencil out.

Dot had taken Eli to the truck for his breakfast.

The old brother stood at the edge of the clearing with his back to us, giving us the only privacy the lake had.

I took the pencil and wrote her name at the top of a clean page.

My hand was shaking from the smoke and the burn, and the letters came out crooked.

I tore the page out and started again.

"Take your time," Hallie said.

"I don't have any."

"You have all of it."

I looked at her.

She had soot on her cheek and a blanket around her shoulders.

Her hair was singed at the ends, and she had just given a man on a dock exactly what he deserved without raising her voice.

I thought that I had never seen anyone so entirely alive.

I wrote.

I wrote fast, before I could be careful, and when I finished I held the page out and my arm wouldn't stay straight.

"Read it," I said. "I can't."

She took it.

Her eyes went down the lines, and her lips moved on the first one.

She read it aloud, in a low voice.

"Hallie. This is the thirty-second. The first thirty-one never reached you, and for three years I wrote to a woman who didn't hear a word. I'm writing this one sitting next to you.

"You took your cut off in a yard full of men and walked out with your son. I wasn't there. I'd have given a year of my life to be there.

"You found what your green notebook caught Brock hiding. You put Rae in a kitchen full of women and made her say it. You walked onto a dock with your arms empty and talked a man out of a lighter. I have been the president of a club for nine years. I have never been that brave.

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