He Shielded Her, So I Left the Club novel · Chapter 12 of 24
Chapter 12: The Math
I picked up Jared's phone and held it out to him in the gray light.
"Wake up," I said. "You have a message."
He opened his eyes and read it.
The color went out of his face, and he sat up with the quilt around his waist.
"Tell me about November," I said.
"Mara."
"You said tomorrow. It's tomorrow."
He rubbed both hands over his face and let them drop.
"Five years ago," he said. "November. Gage and Delilah had broken up for the third time, and he wasn't taking her calls."
"Go on."
"She came to the shop to ask if I'd seen him. It was snowing. She was crying, and she'd had a few drinks, and I was thirty-one and lonely."
"You slept with her."
"Once."
The word sat between us.
"One night," he said. "It was a week before the sheriff came for me about the trailer."
"Gage's trailer."
"Gage's trailer. I went in the first week of December and I didn't come out for eighteen months."
I pulled the blanket up to my collarbone, because I'd gone cold all over.
"Did you tell Gage?"
"I couldn't. She was a Haskell, and I was the son of the man her brother put away, and she was Gage's. It was the worst thing I'd ever done in my life, and I got arrested a week later and told myself that was the price."
"And then?"
"Delilah wrote me once. In February, in county."
His voice was rough.
"She said she and Gage were back together. She said she was expecting, and the baby was his, and I was never to say a word about November to anyone. She said it would start a war."
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