CHAPTER THIRTEEN

KNOX

Saturday started with Hunter showing up at my door at seven-forty-five wearing a tiny leather jacket over his dinosaur pajamas.

He had his helmet under his arm.

"Luna says she's not ready yet," he announced. "But I am ready. I have been ready."

I crouched down. "You're not wearing pants."

He looked down. Considered this. "I'll go put pants on," he said, with the gravity of a man making a tactical adjustment.

He came back with pants and Mara, who had apparently arrived for morning coffee and was wearing an expression that suggested she had been briefed on the ride and had opinions.

"I've already given Knox the safety lecture," she told no one in particular, "but I want it on record that I'm choosing to trust the process."

"Noted," I said.

"Don't make me regret it."

Riley came out at eight-fifty-five in jeans and boots and a leather jacket I'd never seen — supple black, well-broken-in, the kind that fits like it was made for a specific person and eventually becomes that person's skin. Her hair was down. She had her helmet under her arm — the one from the shop, her regular one, not one of the kids' — and she was looking at the bikes in the parking lot checking tread on the red one I'd painted for her, running one hand along the tank the way she does with bikes she's about to trust with her body.

I forgot three words of English. Possibly four.

"You good?" she asked without looking up.

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, I'm good."

Luna had painted fresh wolf prints on her helmet since Wednesday. Small ones, her own handprints reduced to paws, arranged in a running pattern around the crown. I don't know when she'd done it. I don't know how she'd gotten the paint. I chose not to investigate.

We went mountain roads north, toward a state lake I'd mapped out earlier in the week. Light traffic, good curves, long stretches of open road between the turns. I set the pace easy — Riley behind me on the red bike, a twin each, helmets and leathers and the clean Pacific Northwest morning air coming in off the mountains. I kept checking my mirrors. Not for traffic.

Her eyes were closed.

I almost ran a light.

At the lake the twins shifted before we'd gotten the kickstands down. Not fully — just that flicker-shimmer that happened when they got excited or overwhelmed, fur rippling under skin for a moment, eyes going silver-gold and bright. They thought it was hilarious. Luna shifted one hand all the way to a paw and then back and held it up to show me like she'd done a magic trick. Hunter got his ears briefly before dissolving into giggles about it.

I crouched with them on the grass and we practiced the pull-back. Breathe in, find the center, breathe out. It's not a trick I can explain in words — it's a feeling, something you find with practice and then never forget, the internal equivalent of finding your balance on a bike for the first time. Hunter got it in about ten minutes. Luna got it in five and then tried to teach Hunter, which he objected to strenuously.

Riley sat on a rock about twenty feet away and watched.

I knew she was watching. I didn't look at her. I just worked with the twins, voice low, patient, the way you talk to kids when you're teaching them something that matters — and I was aware of her the whole time, the way I'm always aware of her, the way the bond pings like a compass needle toward magnetic north.

When the twins ran to the water I went to the rocks.

She didn't move over to make room and I sat next to her anyway, close enough that our arms were almost touching. The lake was cold and blue and the twins were splashing each other and arguing about fish.

We didn't talk for a long time.

It was — I don't have the right word for it. The closest I can get is *enough.* Like the world was exactly the size it needed to be for those twenty minutes. Two people on a rock, watching their kids in a lake, not having to be anything or do anything or say anything at all.

She put her chin on my shoulder on the way home.

I felt it happen. She was half-asleep — Luna asleep against her back, Hunter asleep with his arms around my waist in the front, both of us going slow on the last stretch of road back to the city — and her chin came down on my shoulder the way it used to, back when we were seventeen and she'd fall asleep in the passenger seat of my truck and end up tilted toward me without meaning to. Like gravity.

I felt her realize it. That fraction of stillness that meant she'd noticed what she'd done.

She didn't move.

Neither did I.

We rode the last fifteen minutes like that and I didn't say a single word about it and neither did she and it was the best fifteen minutes I'd had in about five years.

I sat in the parking lot after for a long time.

Then I called my attorney and told him to file the formal challenge to the Heir Recall Act. Tonight. I didn't care what time it was. Whatever it cost, file it.

I was done giving the elders room to move.