CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

KNOX

I ride in the morning now.

Same roads I've been riding for three years, since we settled the pack land and built what needed building and I started needing an hour every dawn to let the wolf run quiet before the day started. The early mornings here are something I didn't expect — not the quality of them, exactly, because I'd been told the area was beautiful, but the specific way they've started to feel. Like each one is its own small complete thing.

I think about the five years sometimes. Not obsessively. Not with the weight it used to have. More the way you think about a scar you've had long enough that it's just part of your topography — you know it's there, you know how it got there, and you don't look at it expecting it to be something else.

The feral period. The whiskey. The silences at four in the morning that I now know were Riley nursing the twins, three thousand miles away, the bond carrying just enough warmth to keep me from going completely under.

I processed it.

I stopped outside the building in Seattle on the way back once. Just stopped. Stood on the sidewalk in front of what used to be Riley's apartment building, which is now a Blackthorn-Harper Pack community center — half-price workshop rentals for aspiring custom builders, a small legal aid clinic for mixed-blood wolves, a very good coffee cart run by a wolf named Demi who makes the second-best coffee in the world behind Mara.

I stood there for a minute.

Got back on the bike.

Home is thirty minutes east now. Pack land, a proper house, the kind of house that happens when two people who both grew up without the thing they needed most build something together and accidentally make it generous. It has two garages — one for the bikes, one for the cars — and a workshop off the main garage that is technically Riley's but in practice belongs to whoever's in it, which is usually Hunter.

The morning I came home to was a Tuesday.

The dogs had gotten into the kitchen — two Shepherds named Fig and Brick (Brick being Luna's naming choice, following a tradition established with Gerald and the stuffed wolf years ago). They were investigating the area near the counter where someone had left a bag of granola and they were being very serious about it. I removed them and put the granola somewhere higher.

Riley was calling from upstairs about something. I couldn't hear what. I called back that I was home.

The twins came down in various states of readiness. Hunter at nine is self-sufficient in the mornings in most respects, which means he is fully dressed with shoes on the correct feet but has not combed his hair and has strong feelings about whether that's necessary. Luna is entirely prepared twenty minutes before required and uses the time to read, currently a very thick book about business structures that I had not recommended and which she had acquired independently.

We took the bikes to school.

It's a six-minute ride to the pack school from the house, which is not practical in terms of fuel or road safety relative to the car but which has been the established routine since Hunter asked, at age six, if he could ride to school instead of drive, and I'd said yes, and we'd done it every school morning since.

Hunter, nine years old, acts embarrassed about it.

He holds my jacket the entire ride. Both hands, the whole six minutes, knuckles the same color as his jacket. He does not hold the handlebars or the seat. He holds my jacket and does not comment on this.

Luna waves at cars. At people on the sidewalk. At dogs. At other bikes. At a traffic light she particularly likes because of the shape of the pole. She has been waving at this traffic light for two years and I have never said anything about it.

I came home and Riley was at the kitchen table.

Coffee to her left. Paperwork — the real kind, the planning kind, the kind she gets when the shop has a new direction she's working out in her head before she draws it. The focused look. The slight furrow between her eyebrows that means she's in the middle of solving something.

I sat across from her.

She didn't look up.

She put her foot against mine under the table.

I opened my laptop.

We worked in the same room in the same silence we've been building for six years — the good silence, the kind that has weight and shape and doesn't need to be filled. The bond hummed between us the way it always does now, warm and constant and so completely part of the ordinary fabric of the day that I only notice it the way you notice the sound of the house you live in: present, familiar, exactly what the quiet is made of.

Outside the window the morning was continuing.

The dogs came back and supervised from the doorway.

Fig sighed.

Brick sighed.

Riley turned a page.

I typed a sentence.

This was it. This was all of it. And it was everything.