Our Parents Wed in June, So I Spent the Winter Claiming My Stepbrother novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Saturday Line

By eleven on Saturday, forty people stood in the line for Christmas pies.

My phone lay face down by the register with my mother's text under it.

I had decided to call her at noon, when my shift ended.

I had decided to tell her everything in one breath.

"Four apple, two pecan," said the woman at the front. "And whatever's the fanciest."

"The bourbon pear," I said, and boxed it.

The bell over the door rang, and the line shifted.

Kent walked in.

He wore a camel coat and the tight smile, and he carried two printed photographs in a manila folder.

He did not get in line.

He walked straight to the front, ignoring the people there, and put the folder on my counter.

"Page," he said, in a voice that carried. "I want everyone here to know who you are."

The room went quiet.

The bakery owner stopped, mid-icing, at the back of the kitchen.

"Kent, go home," I said.

"I will. First I'm going to read something."

He opened the folder.

He held up a print of the porch, with Reeve's hand on my back and my face turned up to him.

"This woman is sleeping with her stepbrother," he said to forty strangers.

Somebody in the line said, "Oh my God."

"Her mother married his father in June," Kent went on. "She left me for him. I think her mother deserves to know."

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