They Thought My Mate Chose Her novel · Chapter 5 of 24
Chapter 5: The Widows' Table
Cador had the back door open before the second flash faded.
I caught his sleeve.
"Don't."
"She's in your alley at three in the morning."
"And if you chase the Luna-elect down Fifth Street in the dark, what does that photo look like?"
He stopped with one foot on the step.
Out in the alley, a car door slammed. Headlights swung across the brick and went away.
He looked down at my hand on his sleeve.
I let go.
"Go home, Cador," I said. "Before four. That was the deal."
By eight, the photos were on the pack's page.
Two of them. The first was the two of us bent over the hood, his head down, my face turned up, a hand's width apart.
The second was him, startled, in my lit window at three in the morning.
Under them, Tressa had written: Some of us drank the toast. Some of us are still trying to steal a man who doesn't want them.
Three hundred and twelve comments by noon.
Kitto read them aloud until I put his phone in the steam drawer.
At ten, the bride from Lake Linden called to cancel her fitting.
At eleven, two pack wives came in together and asked for their husbands' suits back, unfinished, pins still in.
"We just think it's better," one of them said, not looking at me.
"Better for who?"
She didn't answer. She paid for the work I'd done, which was more than the Hockings ever had.
By two, the rack by the counter was half empty.
Kitto sat on the pressing table with the books open, doing his crying-math face.
"We've lost a month of regular work in a morning," he said. "And we've got two of us for three hundred robes. We need hands, Wenna. A lot of hands that know a needle."
I looked out the front window at Fifth Street.
This town had sewn its own clothes for a hundred years while the men went down the mines.
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