He Called Me Dramatic, So I Took the Club novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Clean Rectangle

Mallory breaks into her own garage and finds her mother's tin gone from the closet weeks ago; Mace moves her into his garage loft on her terms, and Gage texts that Pearl loses her diner unless the necklace comes Friday.

I picked my mother's picture out of the wet grass and wiped the glass on my sleeve.

Across the street, the neighbor's curtain moved.

She had brought us a pie when we moved in.

She stood in her window now with her arms folded and watched me stand in front of my own front door.

I didn't beg.

I went around the side of the house to the garage, where the keypad still ran on my mother's birthday.

Gage had changed the front lock and forgotten the garage.

The door rolled up, and I went through the utility room and up the stairs into the hall.

The house smelled like him.

I didn't look at the bedroom.

I went to the closet in the spare room, the one with the high shelf, and reached up for the shoebox-sized tin where my mother's necklace had lived.

My fingers found bare wood.

I pulled the step stool over and climbed up to look.

The shelf was covered in a thin layer of dust, and in the middle of it was a clean rectangle the size of the tin.

There was no dust inside the rectangle at all.

It hadn't been moved yesterday.

I put my palm flat on the clean wood, and I could not get my breath to go all the way down.

Gage had taken the tin out of this closet weeks ago.

He'd taken it while he was kissing my forehead good night.

I pulled my mother's quilt off the guest bed instead, and I took the box of her recipe cards from the dresser.

I was carrying them down the stairs when I heard a truck in the driveway.

Mace Wharton stood in the open garage door with his hands at his sides.

"Your neighbor called Pearl," he said. "Pearl called me."

"I'm getting my things."

"I can see that."

He took the quilt out of my arms before I could argue.

He carried it out, then he went to the lawn and loaded the four trash bags into the bed of his truck one at a time.

He did not ask me a single question.

At the curb he opened the passenger door and waited.

"Pearl's only got the one bed," I said. "And Gage knows to look there."

"He won't look at mine."

"Why not?"

"There's a rule. Nobody touches a captain's shop." He shut the door behind me. "There's a loft over my garage. Nobody's in it."

I looked at the house in the side mirror, with my mother's picture frame still on the seat beside me.

"One week," I said.

"One week."

"Separate rooms."

"There's one room and a bathroom, but I'll sleep downstairs on the cot."

"And you don't ask me about Gage."

"Done."

"And I don't ask you about the club."

He kept his eyes on the road.

"Done," he said, but the word came out a half-second slow.

His garage was a long cinderblock building with three bays and a roll-up door painted black.

The loft was up an outside staircase.

Inside there was a bed with a plain gray blanket, a window that looked out at the river, and a little kitchen with one working burner.

He had put clean sheets on the bed.

I noticed that and said nothing.

He set the bags down in the middle of the floor and stood in the doorway.

"The bathroom lock sticks," he said. "Shoulder it."

"Thank you."

"Don't," he said, quiet. "Not yet."

He went down the stairs, and a minute later I heard a wrench start to turn.

I sat on the edge of the bed and took the sparrow out of my boot.

The bent wing was warm from my foot.

My phone buzzed on the blanket, and I thought it was Pearl.

It was a text from Gage.

"Friday you bring me the bird, or you won't have a diner to run to. Dad owns the building. Think about Pearl."

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