Not His Bride Anymore novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Caleb's Fall

On Monday morning I read to eleven toddlers about a bear who lost his hat.

I had just reached the part where the bear sits down in the snow when the library doors banged open.

Caleb came in with a bunch of red roses and a face.

Behind him came his mother.

She still wore her good gray coat from the gala.

The stepfather walked two steps back, red to the ears.

"Ainsley," Caleb said, loud, in the soft, cracked voice he used when he wanted a room to feel sorry for him. "I need two minutes. Please."

Twenty parents turned to look.

The toddlers did not care.

A little boy in a yellow hat said, "Keep reading."

"Story time is over," I said, and I closed the book. "Everyone, snack table in the back, please."

The parents scooped up their kids.

Nobody left the building.

Savannah stood at the end of the nonfiction aisle in my spare cardigan, with her hand pressed to her stomach.

She had come to work with me because she had nowhere else to sit.

She looked at Caleb.

He did not look at her.

"I made a mistake," he said to me, holding out the roses. "I let your mother get inside my head. I didn't know how to stop. But I love you. I always have."

"Those are for me?"

"They're for you."

"Savannah," I said, without turning my head. "Come here."

Savannah walked up the aisle.

Caleb's smile slipped.

"Say it," I said to him. "Say it to her face. Say whose baby it is."

"Ains..."

"You told the whole ballroom it was yours."

"I was drunk."

"You'd had one glass of champagne."

Caleb's mother stepped forward.

She was a small woman, moving with cold, fearless certainty.

"Look at me," she said.

He didn't.

"Caleb. Look at your mother."

He did.

"I stood in that ballroom," she said, in a low, steady voice, "and I heard that a stranger paid you to lie to a girl for six years. And I heard you say you only took the money."

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