They Thought My Mate Chose Her novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: The Hem

"This was in Clement Hocking's coat," I said.

I said it loud, the way I'd said it in the hall.

The wind took my voice down the whole circle and back.

"He's selling the Point," I said. "The resort company in Duluth has been waiting on a signature."

The sound that went through the pack wasn't words.

It was three hundred people breathing in at once.

"And he's already been paid for it," I said.

I turned the phone so the elders could see.

Every head turned to Tressa, alone on the sand in my red silk.

Then every head turned to Clement.

"That's a forgery," Clement said. "That girl has had a grudge against my family since..."

"Then let's ask the man who wrote it," I said.

I pointed up the bluff at the car with Duluth plates.

Kitto was already running.

The pack waited in a silence I'll remember till I die.

The man from Duluth came down the path with his phone flashlight on, in my hemmed trousers, picking his way through the snow.

He stopped at the edge of three hundred hooded people on a beach at night.

He looked like he wanted to be in Duluth very badly.

"Sorry," he said. "Is this the family thing?"

"It is," I said. "Who are you here to meet?"

"Mr. Hocking." He found Clement in the circle and lifted a hand. "And his daughter. She signs as... I'm sorry, I forget the word."

"Luna," said Merryn.

"That's it."

"And the deposit?"

He looked at Clement, and then at me, and then at the faces.

"Four hundred thousand," he said slowly. "Wired to Mr. Hocking's account in August. Is there a problem?"

"There is now," said Merryn.

Then the widows stepped out of the circle.

All nine of them, one after another, with their hoods down.

"Our pension checks have been half for two years," the oldest one said. "Clement Hocking keeps the fund. We'd like to know where the other half went."

"Ask him about my ring while you're at it," Merryn said.

Clement opened his mouth.

"One more thing," I said.

I took my mother's sewing tin out of the pocket of my robe.

I opened it in the agent's flashlight and took out a square of tissue, and unfolded it.

A scrap of red silk charmeuse, the size of a postage stamp, scorched black on one edge.

"I found this in the ash under my back door the morning after my storeroom burned," I said. "The glass was broken inward. My mother's dress form was gone."

I looked at the oldest widow.

"Would you look at her hem for me? I'm not allowed to touch the dress."

The oldest widow walked out onto the sand.

Tressa didn't move.

The old woman bent, with a hand on her own knee, and lifted the back of the red skirt into the light.

The hem was singed brown along the back. There was a notch out of it, ragged, burned at one edge.

I put the scrap against the notch.

It fit like the last piece of a jigsaw.

Nobody said anything at all.

Tressa looked down at her own hem.

Then she looked across the circle at her father.

Something went out of her face that I'd never seen leave it before. It was the certainty that somebody would fix this for her.

She reached behind her for the hooks I'd sewn down the back of that bodice.

She undid them one by one with shaking hands.

She stepped out of my red gown on the cold sand in her slip, and picked her robe up and pulled it around her.

She held the gown balled in her fists against her chest.

She didn't look at anyone.

She walked away up the beach into the dark.

Clement watched her go and didn't call her name.

Cador stood up.

"Clement Hocking," he said, and his voice carried the way it had in my shop. "You're not my Beta. You're not this pack's."

Clement looked at him.

"Your father trusted me," he said.

"He did," said Cador. "That's why it's going to be the pack that decides what happens to you. In the hall. Not me."

The elders stood up behind Merryn, one by one.

The senior elder spoke for the first time that night.

"The Fifth Street building goes to the widows' fund," he said. "Tonight. Everything you own goes after it."

The agent from Duluth backed up two steps toward the path.

"I think," he said carefully, "the closing's off."

He went back up the bluff with his flashlight bobbing.

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