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 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Stone

Caly stands at Bethany's stone in the McCracken cemetery and Ned, finding her there, tells her what her father did.

The women took me to church on Sunday because it was easier than leaving me in the kitchen.

Church on the Knob was the arbor again, with the fire pit swept and a camp-meeting preacher in a tie that did not match his shirt.

He preached on Ruth.

I sat on the end of a plank bench and looked at the floor, and nobody sat within two feet of me.

When it was over I asked the tall woman if there was a graveyard.

She stared.

"I sit with the dying for a living," I said. "I'd like to see where you put yours."

She said nothing for a moment.

Then she said, "Up above the orchard," and walked me there herself.

It was a fenced hillside plot, with a gate on a leather hinge and the grass kept short.

McCracken after McCracken, in granite and fieldstone, going back a hundred and fifty years.

I walked slowly along the rows reading the names, the way I read the names on my patients' charts.

The tall woman stayed at the gate with her arms folded.

Near the top, under a cedar, there was a stone newer than any of the rest.

It was white marble, not grey, with sharp edges.

*BETHANY MCCRACKEN. Aged nineteen.*

Under it a date had been cut in letters a different size, deeper and clumsier, as though by another hand.

Fourteen years ago, in November.

There were fresh pine boughs laid across it, tied with twine.

I stood there with my hands in my father's pockets.

I had never met her.

I knew who she was.

Everyone on the ridge knew the story, though nobody told it straight.

The old McCracken Alpha's daughter had been found dead in November.

The McCrackens had blamed the Lowrys of Laurel Gap.

Nobody on either side had ever spoken of it in my hearing.

My father had gone gray the year it happened.

That was all I knew.

At the far corner of the plot, away from the rows, there was a plain slab of grey stone grown over with moss.

It had no flower on it and no cut pine and nothing on its face but a name.

*McCracken.*

I walked toward it.

"You will not stand there."

I turned.

Ned McCracken stood at the gate, in a canvas work coat, with his hands at his sides.

I had not heard him come.

The tall woman had slipped away.

"I'm not standing there," I said. "I'm standing here."

"You are standing at her stone."

"I'm standing where I like."

I did not say it loudly.

I said it plainly, the way I tell a family the doctor isn't coming.

He crossed the grass.

He stopped on the other side of the white marble, with the stone between us and his big hands hanging at his sides.

In daylight his eyes were bluer.

There was a day's beard on his jaw and a bruised look under the eyes, as if he had not slept.

I did not think he had.

I had heard him pace until nearly dawn.

"The rule of this house," he said, "is that no Lowry sets foot on this hill."

"Then you should have bought a different woman."

I saw him take that.

His nostrils flared, and a muscle jumped in his jaw.

I was close enough to smell him, apples and woodsmoke and something warm and dark under it.

It went straight to my wolf.

She whined.

I put my hand on the cemetery gate beside me to steady myself, and he put his on the same rail.

His hand lay six inches from mine, big and scarred.

Neither of us moved.

"She was nineteen," he said. His voice had dropped. "She was going to your land."

"My father's land," I said.

"Your father's land."

"Why was she going there?"

"To ask for a place for the night," said Ned.

I looked at the pine boughs, which somebody had tied with twine.

"My father said no?"

"Your father put her in the ground."

It went through the cold air like a thrown stone.

For a moment I could not speak.

I watched his face, and I saw that he meant it.

He had believed it for fourteen years, every day of every one of them.

I could have argued.

I could have said my father was the kindest man I ever knew.

He mended the church roof and he kept bees.

When my mother was dying he had slept on the floor of her room for six weeks.

But I looked at the white stone and I thought: he's been alone with this a long time.

"My father never told me one thing about your sister," I said.

"I don't believe you."

"I know you don't. It's still true."

Something happened in his face then.

I had been watching it go flat and shut since the arbor.

Now I saw it give, a little, at the mouth.

His mouth worked.

His eyes went to the moss-covered slab in the far corner and then back to me, fast, as if I might have seen.

"Don't ask about that one," he said.

"I wasn't going to," I said.

"You were looking."

"I'm always looking." I shrugged. "It's what I do. I'm in a lot of rooms where people don't say things."

He stared at me.

He had not expected that.

I saw the stiff line of his shoulders let go by a fraction.

Then his face shut again.

"You will go down to the house," he said.

"I'll go when I'm ready."

"You'll go now."

I did not move my hand from the gate.

"Is that an order?" I said. "Because I wrote a rule about that. You read it."

A long pause.

The wind came up the hill and turned the pine boughs over, and the twine whispered on the marble.

"It is not an order," Ned said slowly. "It is a request."

I looked at him.

I had never heard a man like that say the word.

"Then I'll think about it," I said, and I took my hand off the gate and walked down through the rows past Bethany and past the moss-covered slab, without looking back.

I could feel him standing there.

I could feel the pull in my chest running back up the hill.

I did not turn around until the orchard hid me.

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