You Are Not Rejecting Me novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Guest Wing

Nia's first night alone in the lodge, a plate outside her door, and Marigold at the gate saying the hand in the photo is not hers.

The lodge was too quiet with Seren gone.

I sat on the edge of the guest bed with my phone in my hand and read the pack group chat from the beginning.

Sixty-three messages.

Most of them were about the photo, and about me.

Is the twin going too? Did she reject Idris? Poor Idris.

Seren had written me one text, forty minutes after she drove off.

You'll come around. Sleep on it. I'm at the motel on Route 9.

I read it three times.

Then I turned my phone face down on the quilt, the way she had turned hers on the counter.

I had not unpacked.

The bag sat by the door, and the hangers in the closet were bare, and I could not make myself decide between them.

Down the hall, a stair creaked.

A plate scraped on the floorboards outside my door.

Then steps went away again, slowly, back toward the main wing.

For two years I had stepped around that plate.

I had told myself it was none of my business who left it and why.

This time I opened the door.

The plate was covered with a dish towel, and the plate underneath was still hot.

Mac and cheese, baked, with the burnt cheese on top left at the corners.

That was exactly how I liked it.

I had not told anyone that.

I had not ever said it out loud, not in two years of eating at the same table as Idris, not once.

I picked up the plate and carried it back inside, and I sat on the floor with my back against the bed and I ate every bite.

It was the best thing I had eaten all year.

Cadell's door at the end of the hall stayed closed, and his truck was gone.

Somewhere on the ridge a wolf howled once, and stopped.

In the morning I went downstairs in yesterday's sweater.

Idris was at the stove in a flannel shirt, with a pan of eggs in one hand and the phone to his ear.

"No," he was saying. "No, he's not seeing anyone today. Tell them the Alpha's busy."

He hung up and looked at me.

"Morning."

"Morning."

He slid a plate of eggs across the counter without being asked.

I sat on the stool and ate them.

I said, "The mac and cheese was good."

He kept his eyes on the pan.

"There's more in the fridge."

"How did you know about the corners?"

"You pick them off the pan with your fingers," he said. "Every time you think nobody's looking."

I put my fork down.

"You've been watching me eat."

"I live here, Nia. It's hard not to see you eat."

"For two years."

He shrugged, one shoulder, and flipped an egg.

"Somebody has to know how you like it."

I did not have anything to say to that, so I drank my coffee, and my face went warm, and my wolf, who had been silent for a whole day, shifted in her sleep.

Idris did not look at me again until the doorbell rang.

Nobody rings the bell at the Garland lodge.

The pack walks in, or it calls from the gate.

He wiped his hands on a towel and went to the door.

I followed him to the hall in my socks.

A woman stood on the porch holding a covered casserole dish in both hands.

She had red-brown hair in a long braid and freckles across her nose, and she wore muddy boots and a canvas barn coat.

I had never seen her before.

"I'm sorry," she said, before either of us had said a word. "I know I shouldn't be here."

Idris held the door but did not open it any wider.

"Marigold."

"I'm Marigold Sorley, the vet." She said it to me, and I knew then whose name was in every message on my phone. "I treat the horses on the north ridge. I brought a chicken casserole, which is a stupid thing to bring, but it was this or nothing. I heard what the photo did."

"You were in the photo," I said.

"I wasn't," she said.

Her voice was steady, and her eyes were red from no sleep.

"I was in a barn in Tillery that Tuesday night with a mare in trouble. I have the invoice and the farmer's number, and the time on both is past ten. I have not spoken to Cadell in eleven years, and I haven't been inside the Antler since I got back."

Idris said nothing.

I looked at the casserole.

"Why come here?" I said.

"Because your sister rejected him over my face," Marigold said. "And it isn't my face."

She set the dish on the porch rail and held up her right hand, with the fingers spread.

The ring finger was bent at the middle joint and would not straighten.

"I broke this one at nineteen, and it set crooked," she said. "Look at the photo again. Look at the hand on his arm."

I took out my phone and enlarged it, with Idris reading over my shoulder.

The hand on Cadell's arm had five straight fingers.

"That isn't my hand," Marigold said.

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