After My Fiancé Rejected Me, I Became His Uncle's Fated Mate novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Pearl's Table

Pearl feeds her, Cade and Mirabel come to evict her, and Mirabel says three more days would have made it all unnecessary.

Pearl did not let me stay in the cottage that night.

She wrapped me in her own wool coat, put her arm around my waist, and walked me down the hill to the lodge by the creek.

"I raised you on this kitchen floor," she said. "You are not getting sick alone in a house with a leaky tap."

I slept in the room above her kitchen, in the bed with the quilt she'd made when I was nine.

The fever came and went in waves.

Every time it peaked, the pine floor creaked outside my door.

When I opened it, the hall was empty.

I woke to the smell of bacon and the sound of Pearl banging a pan.

"Eat," she said, and slid a plate in front of me the size of a hubcap.

"I can't."

"You can. Three pancakes, two eggs, and then you can cry."

I ate two pancakes and a strip of bacon, and I did not cry.

Pearl watched me with her blue eyes narrowed.

"My grandson is a fool," she said. "I told his father that boy would rot something. He didn't listen. Neither did Lachlan."

"Lachlan hasn't listened to anyone since before I turned twenty-two."

"Lachlan," Pearl said, and put down her spatula, "is a more complicated animal than you think."

"He broke his hand on a tree, he said. For no reason."

"Did he." Pearl picked up the spatula again and flipped a pancake very hard. "Eat your eggs."

Outside, someone knocked on the lodge door.

It was not a polite knock.

Pearl wiped her hands and went to open it, and I heard Mirabel's voice before I saw her.

"We're here to see June."

I went out onto the porch with a pancake in my hand.

Cade stood on the bottom step in a clean shirt, looking tired and annoyed.

Mirabel stood beside him in white jeans and a cashmere wrap, with one hand spread over her flat stomach.

Six neighbours had stopped on the path to watch.

I knew them all. I had balanced their books and baked their kids' birthday cakes.

"What do you want?" I said.

"The cottage," Mirabel said. "It's pack housing, assigned to Cade's household. You're not in his household anymore."

"It's my name on the lease."

"It's his mother's name on the lease," she said sweetly. "You were just living in it. I'd like to be in by tonight, because I'm two months along and I can't be climbing stairs in a rented room."

She said the last part loudly enough for the whole path to hear.

A woman near the front gasped.

Someone whispered "Two months."

I calculated backward in my head and kept my face still.

Two months ago, Cade and I had gone ring shopping for our wedding bands.

He had held my hand in the jeweller's and told me I had beautiful fingers.

"Congratulations," I said.

Cade didn't meet my eyes.

"We're not trying to be cruel," he said. "It's just practical. You can't stay in the house of a man who rejected you, June."

"No," I said. "I'll go."

Mirabel blinked. She had come ready for a fight.

"I'll go right now," I said. "I just want everyone to see what I'm taking."

I went back in, took the cardboard box Pearl kept for the church sale, and walked down to the cottage with six neighbours trailing after me.

I stood in my own front room and I packed.

One duffel bag of my clothes. My mother's cast-iron skillet. My own laptop and my own mill ledgers.

Then I picked up everything of Cade's.

The hoodie he'd left on my sofa for a year. The sneakers. The pack signet cufflinks. The framed photo of the two of us on the mill bridge.

I laid it all in the box, folded neatly, and carried it out onto the porch.

Mirabel stood there with her mouth open.

I set the box in her arms.

"His laundry's in the basket," I said. "He doesn't separate his colours. He'll tell you he does."

Somebody on the path made a strangled noise.

Cade went red up his neck. "June."

"Everything in this house I paid for, I'm taking," I said, to the neighbours, not to him. "Everything I didn't, she can have. The sofa is his mother's."

I hitched my duffel on my shoulder.

An engine growled at the bottom of the hill.

A black truck came up the road and stopped hard behind Mirabel and Cade.

Lachlan got out.

He wore the grey henley from last night, and his right hand was bandaged.

The path went quiet.

He looked at the box, then at me, then at his nephew.

"The cottage is hers," he said.

"Uncle," Cade said, "it's pack housing."

"I'm the pack's Alpha, and I'm assigning it." He didn't raise his voice. "It's June Rowley's until she says otherwise."

"You can't do that."

"I just did."

Cade said nothing. Mirabel clutched the box.

I looked at the Alpha, and for the first time in three years he looked back at me and didn't walk away.

I was the one who looked away.

When I did, Mirabel was standing close enough to touch, with her face turned so only I could see it.

She wasn't angry anymore.

She was smiling, and her voice was a thread.

"Five more days," she whispered, "and none of this would have mattered."

"Mirabel," Cade snapped. "Shut up."

She had gone pale, and he had gone paler.

I stood on my porch and held the duffel against my ribs, and I did not understand what I had just heard.

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