CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

RILEY

Reyes gave me the names of the three half-bloods with the Harper-Wren bloodline at the end of October.

Two women, one man. Ages twenty-eight, thirty-one, and thirty-four. Scattered across three different pack territories in the Northwest. None of them knew each other. None of them knew the full story. Each of them knew they were half-blood, knew their pack standing was incomplete, knew something about their history had been kept from them.

I read their names three times.

Then I set the paper down on the workbench and went back to the Norton restoration, which I'd been working on for six weeks and was two days from completion, and I let myself think about it while my hands did the familiar work.

Three people who shared something I hadn't known about until recently. Three people who were, in some biological and historical sense I was still learning to map, connected to me. Not family, exactly — we didn't share parents. We shared an erased legacy. A man who had tried to build something and been killed for it, and whose bloodline had been scattered and hidden by the people who'd wanted to erase him.

Grayson had found all three through different methods — pack records, contact networks, the kind of lateral research he was extraordinary at. He'd confirmed the bloodline on two of the three through a genetic analysis process I hadn't asked the details of because Grayson's methods were often things I was better off knowing the results of rather than the process.

Reyes had already been in contact with one of them — the oldest, a woman named Daria who'd been born in Portland and had been asking questions about her own history for years with limited results. Daria already knew about Reyes. She'd been told there was someone who had information.

"She wants to meet you," Reyes had said.

"I know," I'd said.

"She's been waiting longer than you have."

"I know that too."

The meeting was scheduled for the second week of November. At the shop — my choice, my territory, the place where I was most fully myself. Knox had offered to be there. I'd said I needed to do this one first conversation alone.

He'd said okay immediately.

That was still something I was adjusting to. The immediacy of his okays on the things that mattered. I'd been waiting for the management, the gentle redirection, the he-knows-best energy that certain men radiated when they felt ownership over a situation. It kept not coming. He kept just — stepping aside. Moving around me rather than through me.

I was beginning to believe it was deliberate.

The night before the meeting with Daria I put the twins to bed — Hunter, who was now in the phase of reading everything within reach, was working through a book about motorcycle engineering that Knox had given him and had opinions about the section on carburetors. Luna was in her elaborate pre-sleep routine, which involved Gerald being arranged in a specific orientation and a brief nightly conference about the day's events in which she appeared to be filing them.

I went downstairs.

Knox was at the kitchen table with his laptop and a coffee, the quiet work of the late evening. I sat across from him. He looked up, read me, didn't ask.

"I'm nervous," I said. I didn't say it to him very often. The honest version, without the operational frame.

"I know."

"Which is odd because I'm not—"

"You're not usually nervous. You're anxious sometimes, before things with uncertain outcomes, but this is different." He looked at me. "This is hope. It feels like nervousness because hope has the same physical signature and you don't let yourself feel it very often."

I stared at him.

He looked back at his laptop.

"Knox."

"Yeah."

"That was a very precise thing to say."

"It was accurate."

"It was accurate," I agreed. "When did you—" I stopped.

"Grayson talks," he said. "And I listen. To most things."

I thought about four years ago. The man who'd left. The man who'd come back. The distance between those two versions and whether it was far enough.

It was different now. That was the thing I kept arriving at, the conclusion I kept finding when I followed the thread honestly. Whatever had made him leave was still part of his history, still something I had to factor into the risk calculation, and also it was genuinely different now, and I was tired of pretending I didn't notice the difference.

"I'm going to meet her tomorrow," I said. "Daria."

"I know."

"And after that, the other two."

"I know."

"And then we're going to figure out what it means for the framework. For the work."

"I know." He looked up again. "Riley."

"What."

"You're going to be great tomorrow."

I looked at him.

"That's not — I'm not saying it to manage you. I'm saying it because it's true and because I think you know it and I think it sometimes helps to have it said out loud."

I was quiet for a moment.

"It helps," I said.

"Good."

I got up. Went to bed. Lay in the dark for a while thinking about hope and how it felt like nervousness and whether the distinction mattered, and eventually slept.