Page 1 of Owl’s Cherished Mate

1

BONNIE

The lunch rush had been brutal.

My feet ached, my lower back screamed, and there was a grease stain on my apron I didn’t remember getting. I untied it and took it off before grabbing my jacket from the hook by the kitchen door.

“You okay?” Mila asked from behind the counter, where she was already prepping for the dinner service. Her chestnut hair was twisted up in its usual messy bun, and there was flour on her cheek from the hushpuppies she’d been making. “You seemed a little off today.”

“I’m fine,” I said, forcing a smile. “Just tired.”

It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth either. Tired didn’t begin to cover it. Tired was what normal people felt after a long day. What I felt was something heavier—something that had settled into my bones months ago and refused to leave.

Mila studied me for a beat, her green eyes soft with concern. She was always so kind. She’d been kind since the day she’d hired me, back when no one else in Driftwood Cove would give me the time of day. I was Gravis Williams’s daughter, and that name was practically poison in this town now. Even so, Mila hadn’t flinched when I’d filled out the application. She’d looked at my availability, asked when I could start, and that had been that.

I owed her more than she knew.

“Get some rest tonight, okay?” she said, turning back to her hushpuppies.

“I will.”

Another lie, but she didn’t need my problems.

I pushed through the back door and stepped into the afternoon sunlight. The air was cool and smelled like salt and fish from the docks down the road. A couple of fishermen walked past on the sidewalk, and one of them—an older guy with a gray beard and a name I couldn’t remember—glanced my way and then quickly looked somewhere else.

I was used to it.

The sideways looks. The way people’s expressions shifted when they realized who I was. Not outright hostility, just this sense of discomfort, like being near me might somehow make them guilty by association with everything my dad did.

The drive home took less than twenty minutes. Our house sat at the end of a dead-end road on the outskirts of town—a small, faded-blue two-bedroom with a sagging front porch and a yard that needed mowing. It had been Dad’s. Now it was mine, at least until I figured out something better.

Which, at this rate, could take years.

I noticed Lawson’s bike was tossed in the front yard when I pulled up.

He was home?

My stomach tightened. It was two something in the afternoon on a Tuesday. He should be at school still.

I climbed the porch steps and pushed the front door open. The TV was on—some show I didn’t recognize—and Lawson was sprawled across the couch in jeans and a black hoodie I’d never seen before. His dark hair hung in his eyes, and his sneakers were still on, propped up on the armrest like he owned the place.

“Hey,” I said, setting my keys on the table by the door. “Why aren’t you at school?”

“Didn’t feel like going.”

The words came out flat. There was no attitude in them. No hint of defiance. They were just flat.

“You can’t just not go because you don’t feel like it, Lawson.”

He didn’t respond. He didn’t even look at me. His eyes stayed on the TV.

I took a breath and tried again. “Did something happen? Did someone say something to you?”

“No.”

“Then why⁠—”

“I said I didn’t feel like it.” His jaw tightened, and for a second I caught a flash of something in his eyes before he shut it down. “Can you stop?”