He Shielded Her, So I Left the Club novel · Chapter 19 of 24
Chapter 19: The Gavel
Jared's POV
My uncle lives in a ranch house at the end of a gravel road, and I had not been inside it in four years.
He answered the door in his undershirt with a coffee mug in each hand.
"Sit," he said. "It's black. I've never made it any other way."
I sat at the kitchen table where I ate Christmas dinner every year until the trailer.
There was a photograph on the wall by the refrigerator that I had not looked at in a long time.
It was my father at nineteen, on a bike, squinting into the sun.
He had gray eyes, and a chin with a dent in it.
"She's got his chin," my uncle said, nodding at the picture.
"Hattie?"
"Hattie. I saw it Sunday and nearly fell off my chair."
I looked at the photograph and then at my hands.
"I never saw it."
"You weren't meant to. A man doesn't look for his own face in a child he's been told isn't his."
He sat down across from me.
He was sixty-one and looked eighty, and his hand shook when he lifted the mug.
"I'm going to say this plainly, because I'm tired," he said. "I'm stepping down."
"Uncle."
"Gage is stripped. He can't hold a gavel, and I wouldn't give it to him if he could. Half my table is sixty years old. The other half is boys who never rode behind Callum." He pushed a flat wooden hammer across the table, worn pale where his thumb went. "You're road captain. You did eighteen months for this club and never gave up a name. Take it."
I did not touch it.
"You want me to run the club."
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