My Boyfriend Cheated With My Best Friend, So the Pack Law Handed Me to His Brother novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Forty-One Pounds
The thaw came on the second Saturday of March, and the whole harbor ran with water.
The ice had gone out of the river in a night.
The scallopers were back at State Pier with their winches thumping, and the auction floor smelled of diesel and wet rope.
I stood at my scale at five with the clipboard and the first tote at my feet.
The old man at the ice machine said, "Morning, Zia," and said it loud.
I weighed the tote.
Forty-one pounds, dry, and the number was the same as yesterday.
My name was back on the pier board in chalk, over the scale, in the clerk's careful hand.
*Pacheco.*
I looked at it for a while.
The spring Council met that night, and it was the last night I could say what I had put in term five.
Everyone in the pack knew it.
The Fatima hall was full again, warm and steamed at the windows, with new paper banners.
I walked in by the front door in my good black dress with my hair down.
I walked up the aisle alone.
The long table on the dais had been reset.
There were no elders on it, only a white cloth and a pitcher of water.
Graça sat in her straight chair with the blue bundle in her lap.
Beside her sat the three women from the plant line in their good coats, with the deeds to their houses folded in their handbags.
In the front row, at the far end, sat Bianca in a gray dress with her hands in her lap.
She had come back from Fall River for it.
She did not look at me, and I did not look at her, and that was how we had agreed to do it.
Two rows behind her, on the aisle, sat Tomás in a work jacket that smelled of fish.
He had come straight from the market.
He kept his eyes on his hands, and nobody sat near him, and he had not asked anyone to.
The chair's seat on the dais stood empty.
I stepped up.
Duarte stood in his usual place at the left of the table, in his black suit.
In four months he had come to the shed only on the first of each month, at five, to stand on the wharf with his hands in his pockets.
He had said good morning to my mother, bought a coffee and paid for it, and gone away.
He had kept every term.
I looked at him across the dais, and he looked at me.
He was thinner.
There was more gray at his temples and a new line between his brows, and when he saw me he stopped breathing.
"The Council hears the mate," Graça said.
She did not rise.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Boyfriend Cheated With My Best Friend, So the Pack Law Handed Me to His Brother are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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