REYNA CALDER > Quotes

“here is the checkmate I watched my husband discover in real time, in a warm kitchen, with his brother-in-law’s voice still hanging in the air from dawn: he could not fight it. Not one word. Thirteen days ago the room had been pre-loaded — grief makes liars of widowers, son — and the folder had been built to fit the loading like a key, so that now every syllable Judge spent in my defense purchased proof of his own compromise. Defend the timeline, he’s reciting what she fed him. Vouch for her character, he’s a man bewitched. Produce the truth itself — the willows, the name, the bell — and he is a widower so far gone the ghost has him seeing the founder with a gun. The trap had no outside. The harder the strong man pulled, the better it held, and Abel Crane had built it that way across thirty-two years and thirteen days, patient as scripture, and tomorrow it would close in church with the whole family watching.”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“I want this account to hold what I understood in the silence”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“I want the account to show that I did not beg,”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“I’ll set this down because it belongs to the account of who the man became”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“The mathematics of it, for the record, since the mathematics were the whole stroke:”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“That’s me keeping the record straight, because somebody in this family ought to be in the habit.”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“You don’t buy your own bell,” Mae said, to me, to the lot, to forty years of doctrine. “Somebody who loves you has to gift it. Well. It’s been gifted twice now.” She gave it one small push with her fingertip, and the note went out over two hundred bowed heads, bright and unbroken, the same note I’d known across a dark pull-off on the worst night of my life. “It goes where he’d ride.” Then we rode. Judge took the point, because the new table had asked him to lead this one office or no office, and I rode at his right hand where a president’s old lady rides, and at his left wing — Cash’s wing, the position my brother had held for eight years of runs — the formation kept the slot. The missing man. A hole in the air shaped like him this time, moving down the river road at funeral speed, and behind us two hundred machines rode it solo, every man his own column, the old way, spaced wide — because the old ones say a fallen rider’s spirit gets to choose a bike to travel on, and the family had decided as one body that Cash Hale should have his pick. I rode eleven miles with the bell singing on my bars in the wind, and I will believe until they bury me a second time that I know which bike he chose.”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“in the room where this account has done all its hardest business,”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“The account deserves better:”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“I didn’t move. I want that in the account”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“I said, as gently as this account has ever heard me say anything.”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“Some accounts you close; you don’t burn the ledger.”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“that’s the last account you ever get for free.”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“They laid my brother down next to our father, in the plot where the Hales keep their church when the river’s too far, under a stone that read CASH HALE and both his dates and, beneath them, by the new table’s unanimous vote, one line in deep-cut letters: HE BROUGHT IT TO THE TABLE.”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“I have replayed that doctrine ten thousand times since, because of what it cost him by sundown.”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“Jericho. Look at me. I did not come out of the ground to dig you into it.”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“A president un-kinging himself, in public, in installments, for a woman who had promised him nothing, with the loaded gun in his pocket and his hand off it the whole time. They voted his bond down by voice, and it wasn’t close. They carried the exile by show of hands, and it wasn’t close, and Abel Crane voted against it — against it, sorrowing, overruled by the very mercy he’d authored — which was the most beautiful brushstroke in the whole canvas, and I almost, standing condemned in the middle of my own family, applauded.”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“I stood there and watched the account settle in front of two hundred witnesses,”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“you take all of this to Judge. You hear me? Not the table — Judge. He’s a pain in your ass, but he’s straight, and he loves you stupid, and he’ll do right.”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“I was crying for him. For the man who’d aimed, who’d left the door unlatched, who had done the one unforgivable thing with his eyes open — and then walked into a grief with no floor in it and built a liturgy out of an engine because nothing softer would carry the weight, a hundred and four Sundays, nine seconds at a time, alone.”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“Heaven was informed. Let the record show it took two years, and that when it went, it went loud.”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“I stood in the willows where I’d watched my brother die and I cried for the man who’d put me on this bank to watch it, and the second I caught myself doing it — the very second I named it — I stopped. I slammed the door on it the way you slam a door on weather, both hands, full weight, bolt thrown. My door at the clubhouse didn’t lock from the inside. This one still did.”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“Tillman called up here, the week we were dragging for you — shots off the river, the old fool, poachers. Well, it made the rounds, the way everything does, and one evening that same week the matter come up on the porch, half a joke by then, and Abel says — laughing, easy, in front of six men — hell, I couldn’t tell you about poachers, I was in Mae’s kitchen past one that night, eating her lemon pie. Ask her.”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“It’s all word against a legend,” Judge said. “We’re short a spine.”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“let this account close the way it opened: my hands don’t shake.”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“Hand him to the law with the tape and the testimony and let him die the way he killed: on the record.”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“I will give that morning only one sentence in this account,”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“And through all of it — I want this in the account, because it is the truest sentence I own about that night — I kept my left palm flat over the wrong ink on his chest,”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“Mae put it in my palm and closed my fingers over it with both her floury hands. “It goes home to the giver,” she said. “Till it can go back where it belongs.”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead

“I want to put down what the night did to me,”
― REYNA CALDER, Cheating and Betrayal Marriage in Trouble Second Chance Romance MC Grovel: The Wife He Cheated On Came Back From The Dead