Five Years of Secret Love, He Married My Best Friend novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Notice
Willa tears down the notice of Jarrett's vow with her best friend, confronts him in front of the pack, and finds her room already boxed on the porch.
The paper was pinned to the pack hall porch with four brass tacks.
I read it at five in the morning with Jarrett's scent still on my skin.
"Alpha Jarrett Colefield will take the mate vow with Calla Ridgeway at the Moon Stone, Saturday, November seventh."
Under it was the healer's seal and the Elder's signature.
I had left him asleep on the ridge forty minutes ago.
His hand had been hot around my wrist the whole night, the way it always was until I touched him.
I read the notice again.
Calla was my best friend.
She had been my best friend since we were fourteen.
She split her sandwich with me on the first day of pack high school.
I pulled out the tacks one at a time and put them in my pocket.
Then I folded the notice in half and walked into the hall.
Breakfast was already going.
Eighty wolves sat at the long tables with their coffee and their eggs.
Jarrett sat at the head of the middle table with a plate he hadn't touched.
He looked up, and I watched him know that I knew.
Calla sat on his right.
She wore a pale yellow sweater and she was buttering toast.
She looked so ordinary, and she looked so kind.
I walked the length of the hall with the paper in my hand.
The talk died one table at a time.
"Willa," Jarrett said, quietly, like I was a spooked horse.
"Is this true?" I said.
I held up the notice so the whole hall could see it.
Somebody near the back put down a fork.
"It's not what it looks like," he said.
"It says mate vow, Jarrett."
"It's medical."
I heard that word go down the tables like a stone down a well.
"Medical," I said.
"The wound." He touched his left side without meaning to.
"The healer says the silver won't close without a bond, and the only blood that takes is Calla's."
"The healer tested every unmated woman in the pack," Calla said gently, to the room.
"Willa, honey, I wanted to tell you first."
She laid her hand on his arm.
It was the same arm I had slept on for five years.
Nobody in this room knew that.
I had kept it quiet because he asked me to, and because I loved him.
I had kept it quiet at his grandmother's table and at the spring gathering.
I had kept it quiet at his birthday, standing in the back with a paper plate, watching him blow out the candles.
Five years of staying in the back.
"Tell them how long," I said.
Jarrett's jaw went tight.
"Willa, not here."
"Five years," I said, to the hall, loud and clear.
"Every Tuesday and every weekend and every night you couldn't sleep, he came to me."
A murmur went through the benches.
I saw the Elder at the far table put her cup down very slowly.
Winifred Colefield had a blackthorn cane and a cardigan buttoned to her throat.
She had never once looked at me the way she looked at me now.
"You held my hair back when I was sick on my twenty-first birthday, Calla," I said.
"You told me you were happy for me."
"I did," Calla said, and her blue eyes filled.
"And I'm sorry you're hurting."
She said it so sweetly that two women at the next table reached out to pat her shoulder.
I looked at Jarrett.
I wanted him to stand up.
I wanted him to say, in front of his pack, that I was his.
He looked at the table.
The silence went on long enough that I could hear the river outside.
That was all the answer he was going to give me.
I took the little brass key out of my jacket.
It was the key to the fire-watch cabin on the ridge, the only place we had ever been ours.
I set it down in his untouched eggs.
"I'm done waiting," I said.
Nobody breathed.
"Congratulations on your vow."
I turned and walked back down the hall with my face burning and my spine straight.
The doors closed behind me.
I made it all the way down the porch steps before my knees started to shake.
The records house sat at the bottom of the path.
It was a small clapboard cottage with the pack's old ledgers in front and my bed in the back.
I had lived there eleven years.
I turned the corner and stopped.
My bed frame was on the porch.
My boxes were stacked beside it, taped shut, with my name written on every one in an old woman's hand.
The door behind them had a new lock.
Pinned to it was a card in the Elder's looping script.
"This house is needed for pack business. Collect your things by noon."
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