My Stepmother Sold Me to the Alpha Who Hates My Father's Name, and the Child He Wants Is the Proof That Clears It novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The House

I drove up to Laurel Gap at eight the next morning in a borrowed McCracken truck, alone.

The beta held the door for me.

He said, "Luna," and I said, "Caly," and he looked at his boots and said it again, correctly, and I let him.

Ned stood on the porch.

He had not asked to come.

"I'll be at the line," he said.

"I know," I said.

I took the north road past the old fence and the sign hanging off it by one nail.

I did not stop.

The white house stood at the end of the lane with the springhouse on its left and the bee yard on the hill behind it.

There was a truck in the yard I did not know.

It was a flatbed with a stack of fresh-sawn walnut planks tied down with yellow straps.

I parked behind it and sat for a moment with the engine ticking.

Then I got out.

The front door of my father's house stood open.

I went up the three porch steps.

I had run up and down them ten thousand times with a basket on my hip and a smoker in my hand.

I stopped in the doorway.

The walnut floors were gone, and I looked down at bare joists.

Where my mother's dining table had stood there was a rectangle of raw subfloor.

The plank walls on either side had been stripped to the studs.

The mantel was gone from the front room.

My father's pie safe, the one he had made from a church door, was gone too.

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