2

I would like to say I screamed. I would like to say I threw the cake at his head and called him every ugly name I had ever heard in the pack kitchen, and there were plenty.

I did nothing. I stood under the dripping branch with rain running down the back of my collar and watched my best friend on top of my boyfriend, on a bed of wet pine needles, in the blue dress I had lent her for the happiest night of my life.

It was disgusting. It was humiliating and embarrassing, and the worst part was how quiet it all was. There was no thunder, no gasp, no dramatic sound at all. Just the patter of rain on leaves, and the wet whisper of skin, and Tanya's soft laugh, the one she used when somebody told her a joke she had already heard. I knew that laugh. I had heard it at every sleepover and every failed exam, on every winter night we had shared one blanket on the roof of the omega quarters and pretended we could see the future in the stars. I had never once heard it aimed at me.

The cake box slipped from my fingers. It hit the ground with a flat little thud, and a smell of lemon peel and sugar floated up into the cold air, sweet and ridiculous.

Tanya looked up first.

She did not scramble. She did not clutch the dress to her chest or cry out my name. She met my eyes with a lazy, satisfied expression, the look of a cat that has finally been caught on the good sofa and sees no reason to apologize, and she took her time tucking one curl behind her ear.

Jaxon turned his head a moment later. His mouth was swollen. His shirt hung open. I waited for the horror to drain across his face, for the stammering, for the lies I knew I would have swallowed whole if he had only offered them. I had practiced forgiving him in that single second. I had gotten surprisingly far.

"You weren't supposed to see this yet," he said.

Yet.

The word slid into me like cold water. Wren let out a howl so loud inside my skull that I staggered, pressing both palms against my ears even though the sound did not come from outside.

"Yet," I repeated. My voice sounded very small to me, like it belonged to a girl standing a long way off. "What does that mean? Jaxon. What does yet mean?"

"It means you should have waited at the ceremony like I told you." He sat up and scrubbed his face with one palm, annoyed, the way you would be annoyed at a dog that had gotten into the trash. "I was going to do this properly. In front of everyone, with the elders there. Now you've gone and made it messy."

"Do what properly?"

"Don't act stupid, Sage. It doesn't suit you."

It was the calm that did it. If he had shouted, I could have shouted back. If he had begged, I could have hated him in a straight line. Instead he spoke to me the way he spoke to the stable hands, with a patience that had contempt folded neatly inside it, and I understood, standing there, that he had spoken to me that way for a long time. I had simply called it tenderness.

I turned to Tanya because I could not look at him anymore.

"You held my hand at the funeral," I said. My voice cracked in the middle of her name. "You braided my hair for a year after, because I couldn't lift my arms. You were there."

"I was." She stood and smoothed down the front of the dress. The hem was soaked and streaked with mud, and she looked at it with faint annoyance, as if the dress were the one that had let her down. "And I'm sorry you're hurt, truly. But you can't have honestly thought a boy like Jaxon was going to end up with someone like you."

"How long?"

"Does it matter?"

"How long?"

Tanya sighed. "Since the coronation."

Three months. Three months of dinners and borrowed sweaters and the sleepy little jokes we used to trade on the walk back from training. Three months of her braiding my hair on Sunday mornings, humming, while somewhere down the hall a man I loved waited to be told what he was allowed to want.

My stomach rolled over. I put one hand against a tree to keep from falling, and the bark was rough and cold and real under my fingers, and I held it hard.

"Did Marcus know?"

Jaxon's eyes flicked away. It was the smallest movement, a flinch really, and I would only learn what it meant much later. "My father has nothing to do with this."

"That's not what I asked."

"Leave my father out of it."

"Wow," said Tanya, softly, almost admiring. "You really thought the pack was laughing with you, didn't you? All those years. You thought you were just a quiet little thing they'd gotten used to." She tilted her head. "They've been betting on how long it would take him to get bored. I won forty dollars."

Something went out of me then. It was not rage. I had expected rage, and I waited for it, braced for it like a bruise. What came instead was a long, strange stillness, as if somebody had opened a window in a house I had been living in all my life and let in the weather.

I looked at the blue dress. Its seams were a little crooked where I had taken it in myself, at midnight, with a needle and a candle, because Tanya had said she would love to borrow something of mine for the big night.

"Keep the dress," I said.

It was a stupid thing to say. It was the only thing I could think of that was not a scream.

Wren howled again, a long raw note like a violin string breaking, and I turned and walked back through the trees. I did not run. Not yet. I walked with my back straight and my hands shaking and my best friend's laughter at my back, and I counted my steps the way I used to count stars, because counting was the one thing I knew how to do.

I had reached forty-one when Jaxon called after me.

"Come to the ceremony tonight."

I kept walking.

"Everyone will be there," he said, and his voice was almost kind, which was worse than anything he had said so far. "You should hear it from me first, Sage. Before you hear it from anyone else."