CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

RILEY

Daria came on a Thursday. She was thirty-four, taller than me, with the particular quality of stillness that I recognized because I had it too — the kind you develop when you've been operating without a pack for most of your adult life and have learned to read rooms instead of relying on them.

She sat across from me at the workbench in bay one and we looked at each other for a moment without saying anything.

Then she said: "You look exactly like the photograph."

"Which photograph."

"The one Reyes has. From his pack records. The one taken just before—" She stopped. "You have his jaw. And the—" She touched her own temple. "The way you hold your eyes."

I'd seen that photograph. Grayson's photocopy. I'd been looking at it intermittently for weeks, trying to find myself in it, and sometimes I could and sometimes I couldn't and it depended on the light and my own state of mind.

"She told you everything," I said.

"Most of it. The rogue classification, the death notice, the file she kept." Daria folded her hands on the workbench. She had the hands of someone who worked with them. "She told me you're his daughter."

"She told me about you, too. That you'd been looking for the same information."

"For about six years." She looked at the shop around her — taking it in, measuring it the way half-blood wolves do, assessing the space. "He would've liked this place."

I didn't have a response to that. Not because it hurt, exactly — it was more complex than hurt. It was the ache of a present-tense sentence about someone who didn't have a present tense.

"I want to tell you what Reyes told me about him," Daria said. "The things she knew from actually knowing him. Not just the file." She paused. "If you want."

"I want," I said.

She told me.

It took an hour and a half. I learned that my father had made good coffee and had opinions about music and had been terrible at sitting still during long meetings. I learned that he'd had a way of making people feel that their problem was the most interesting problem he'd encountered, which made everyone want to talk to him about everything, which was part of why the Wren Alpha had found him threatening. I learned that he'd laughed easily and argued carefully and had believed — genuinely, not performatively — that the pack structure could be something better than what it was.

I learned that he had a habit of carrying a pen behind his ear that he never used, because he preferred to remember things than to write them down. I looked at my own hands with the wrench marks from the morning. The grease that never quite came out from under my nails.

When she finished I was quiet for a long time.

"The two others," I finally said. "Reyes mentioned—"

"I've already spoken to one. Theo. He's younger, twenty-eight, and he's been in a complicated situation with his current pack." She looked at me directly. "He needs the framework. The asylum framework. He needs it now, not when it's officially implemented."

"We can get him here early," I said. "The framework is effectively operational. The formal regional announcement is next month but we've been taking cases since September."

She looked at me. "You set it up before the council approval."

"The council approval was going to happen. I wasn't going to make people wait while paperwork caught up."

Something shifted in her face. Something that looked like the beginning of the thing I'd felt when Reyes told me who my father was — the sense of a shape coming clear, pieces finding where they fit.

"He would've done exactly the same thing," she said.

I looked at the workbench.

"Tell Theo to contact Grayson," I said. "We'll get him in before the month's out."

She nodded. Stood. Extended her hand, and then reconsidered and didn't shake it — she pulled me in, briefly, the grip of someone who didn't usually initiate physical contact but had decided this was the situation that required it.

I held on for a second.

Then we stepped back and were two people in a shop again, in the ordinary afternoon light, and she said she'd be in touch and I said I'd be here and she left.

I sat on the floor of bay one for a while.

The Norton was finished. It was against the far wall, completed, ready for the client, polished and assembled and everything I'd intended it to be when I started it. I'd been working on it for weeks. I'd finished it while figuring out who I was. Those two things had happened in the same time frame and I couldn't fully separate them.

Knox texted at four-fifteen: *how'd it go.*

I looked at the Norton. At my hands. At the afternoon light through the bay doors.

*Good,* I texted back. *Really good.*

His response came fast: *good.*

That was all. It was exactly enough.