My Mate's Last Message Wasn't for Me novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Her Mother's Pins

My father was standing at the Hall gate in his ferry coat with a canvas bag at his feet.

He is a tall, weathered man who says about forty words a day, and he had spent most of them getting here.

"You look thin," he said.

"I look fine, Dad."

"You look like your mother."

He hugged me with one arm, hard, and let go.

Cormick had come down the steps behind me.

My father looked him over from his boots to his scarred left palm, and said nothing for a long time.

"You're the heir."

"Cormick Vaux, sir."

"Is it true she's your partner for tomorrow night?"

"Yes, sir."

"She's a slow shifter. Don't rush her."

"I know." Cormick met his eyes. "It's the best thing about her."

My father grunted. It was the highest praise I had ever heard him give a man.

He picked up his bag and walked with us to the guest wing, and at my door he took a small cloth bundle out of it.

"Your mother's," he said. "I kept them since before you were born. I was going to give them to you when you were twenty-one, and then you stopped dancing, and I didn't know how to bring it up."

I unwrapped the cloth.

Inside lay six silver hair pins, each one set with a chip of moonstone.

"She wore them to the Harvest Rite the year before she met me," my father said. "She was a second-year in the troupe. She said it was the only time she felt like the best thing in the room."

My eyes stung.

"You never told me she danced."

"You never asked, and then you left for the lab." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I should have said something when you did. I thought it was your life."

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