Rejected and Pregnant I Fled The Pack novel Chapter 14

Chapter 14

I didn’t owe him that. I didn’t owe him anything.

*Damon and Marissa can have each other,* I thought, running my palm along the dusty counter, imagining the smell of coffee and fresh bread replacing the mustiness currently hanging in the air. Whatever they’d built behind my back over those weeks before I caught them, whatever they thought they deserved from each other now, none of it was my responsibility to manage or mourn anymore. I’d spent months untangling myself from the guilt of walking away, from the old instinctive pull of a bond I’d worked hard to smother into something faint and distant, barely a whisper now instead of the desperate, insistent pulse it had been in those first weeks.

I was going to live for myself now. For my daughter. For the diner I’d wanted since I was young enough to still believe dreams like this were allowed to come true without anyone else’s approval.

The contractor I’d hired-a gruff, kind-eyed human named Pete who didn’t ask questions about why a very pregnant young woman was renovating a diner entirely alone–was due back that afternoon to look at the kitchen wiring. I busied myself sweeping out the worst of the dust while I waited, humming some old, half-remembered tune under my breath, feeling something in my chest that I hadn’t felt in months.

Something that might have actually been happiness.

I didn’t let myself think too hard about how fragile it still felt, how easily it could crack if I dwelled too long on everything I’d lost to get here. The pack I’d grown up in. The mother I’d never fully mourned properly, not with everything else that had happened since. Marissa, who I still sometimes reached for out of old habit before remembering, freshly, that she wasn’t someone I got to miss anymore. Even Damon, if I was honest with myself in the quiet hours before sleep—not the version of him who’d looked at me with such casual disregard in that bedroom doorway, but the version I’d fallen for originally, the one who used to smile at my diner napkin sketches like he actually saw me.

That version had never really existed, I reminded myself. Not in any way that mattered. I couldn’t keep grieving a man who’d been willing to throw away everything the moment it became inconvenient to keep it.

Pete arrived a little after two, tools in hand, and we spent the next several hours mapping out exactly what the kitchen would need-new wiring, updated plumbing, a walk-in cooler I’d found secondhand from a diner two towns over that had closed the previous year. By the time he left, the sun was low and golden through the front windows, and I sat alone on an overturned crate in the middle of my future dining room, exhausted in the particular, satisfying way that came from building something instead of running from it.

I didn’t know, sitting there in that fading light with my hand resting against the gentle curve

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of my stomach, that Damon hadn’t stopped searching.

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