Chapter 1: Home Early

Elara POV

"I'm home!" I called out as the heavy door swung open.

I stepped into the dark entryway and turned to shut the wind and rain outside. The door closed with a soft click. The house felt warm, but my arms were shaking from the cold.

"Darian? Sorelle?" I called, stepping onto the wooden floor of the front hallway. "I finished early today! I brought the things we talked about!"

No one answered from the front room. Down the hall, near the back of the house, plastic blocks tumbled onto the carpet. Then came a little girl's laugh.

"Look at that!" June shouted from the playroom. "It fell all the way down!"

I smiled and hung my wet coat on the brass hook by the door. Hearing June laugh always made me feel better after a long day. I wiped my shoes on the rug and adjusted the brown paper bag under my arm.

Inside was a heavy blue textbook titled Introductory Accounting and Business Methods. It had cost fifty-eight dollars, and it was the last copy on the shelf at the bookstore downtown.

Sorelle was starting her night classes next week. Beside the book sat a bright yellow box of First Light sunscreen bottles. Sorelle always forgot to protect her skin when she took June to the park, and I wanted her to have something nice of her own.

The Glow Day at the women's shelter had ended two hours early. The water heater had broken, and the director sent everyone home. I could have gone back to the lab. Instead I had thought: I'll surprise them.

I was smiling about that when my phone buzzed in my coat pocket. I pulled it out as a gray banner slid across the screen.

Family Sharing: Darian added 6 new photos to Home.

I frowned. I had set up our family iCloud three years ago, when Darian complained that his phone was always full. I paid for the storage plan. I had never opened the album. Darian said it was only boring receipts and photos of the house for the insurance company.

Home. It was a strange name for an insurance folder.

I leaned against the wall and tapped it open, still half smiling, expecting a stack of paint swatches.

The first photo loaded. It was a lake under a pale sky. Darian stood on a wooden dock with June riding high on his shoulders, both of them laughing with their mouths wide open. Next to them, her arm looped through his, stood Sorelle. Her head rested against his arm as if it had always belonged there.

I stared at it. The caption was only three words, typed with a little heart: Our perfect Saturday.

Saturday. Last Saturday, Darian kissed my cheek at the door and told me he had a working weekend with a client in the north. That was the same Saturday I spent hauling boxes of hand cream into the shelter's basement.

"It's a coincidence," I whispered. "He took Sorelle and June to the lake as a favor. He would have told me."

My thumb moved on its own as I swiped left.

The next photo was Sorelle in the passenger seat of Darian's car, laughing, her bare feet on the dashboard. The one after that was a restaurant table with two wine glasses and a child's drawing propped against a candle. I did not recognize the restaurant. I did not recognize the date, either, because it was a night I remembered perfectly: my birthday dinner, the one he left early, saying his stomach hurt.

I kept swiping.

Years of photos. Hundreds. June's first day of preschool, with Darian kneeling to fix her backpack straps. Sorelle's head on his shoulder in a movie theater. A grocery store aisle. A hospital bracelet on a baby tiny wrist. A Christmas tree in a room I had never seen, with all three of them in matching red pajamas.

At the very bottom, the first photo in the album had been uploaded years ago, four months before my wedding.

My chest went tight as the phone felt heavy in my hand.

Deep inside me, my wolf, Vespera, stirred. She was quiet most of the time, but now she rose to her feet behind my ribs, and I felt her hackles lift.

"Don't," I whispered, pressing my free hand against my chest. "There has to be an explanation."

Is there? Vespera's voice was low and flat.

Down the hall, a door opened and shut. I heard a man's voice, low and relaxed, and then a woman's laugh.

I knew both voices. They were coming from Darian's study, at the end of the hallway past the dining room. I slipped off my shoes without thinking, and I walked toward the sound in my socks. The bag crinkled softly against my side, so I set it down on the hall table next to the vase of white tulips.

The study door was open an inch. Lamplight lay across the floorboards in a thin yellow line.

"I'm just saying, I'm tired," Sorelle said. Her voice was not the soft, shy voice she used with me. It was lazy and sharp, with a little pout in it. "I'm tired of whispering. I'm tired of eating dinner at her table and saying thank you."

"You say thank you very well," Darian said. I heard the creak of his leather chair, and the smile in his voice. "You should have been an actress."

"She bought me sunscreen last week. Sunscreen! Like I'm a pet she's training." Sorelle let out a short, bitter laugh. "She thinks she's so kind."

"She is kind. That is exactly the point." Darian's voice dropped into something patient, almost fond. It was the voice he used when he was explaining something to a child. "Kind people are the easiest people in the world to manage. She'll sign whatever I put in front of her, and she'll smile while she does it. You just have to be a little more patient."

"How much more?"

"Two weeks. Pryce says the papers will be ready in two weeks. Then she can go back to making her little face creams, and we get everything."

I stood in the hallway, one hand pressed flat against the wall. The rain had picked up. It drummed against the front windows. Somewhere behind me, June knocked over her tower again and cheered, and the sound was so bright and ordinary that it hurt.

"And if she finds out before then?" Sorelle asked.

"She won't," Darian said. "Elara never looks. That is her great weakness. She would sooner believe a lie than think badly of someone who smiles at her."

Sorelle laughed again, and Darian laughed with her.

Something inside me went very quiet. I looked down at my phone. The photo of the three of them on the dock was still glowing on the screen, the caption blinking up at me: Our perfect Saturday.

My hand did not shake as I raised it to the study door.

Now, Vespera said.

I pushed the door open.Darian sat behind his desk with his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, one ankle crossed over his knee. Sorelle perched on the arm of the leather chair beside him, her yellow flats kicked off on the rug, her fingers resting on his shoulder.

They both turned toward me as Sorelle's face went white, as her hand slid off his shoulder.

Darian did not move; he only looked at me, at my socks and my wet hair and the phone glowing in my hand. Then he let out a long, tired sigh.

"Elara," he said. "You're home early."

I held up the phone so he could see the screen.

"Tell me," I said quietly, "what is 'Our perfect Saturday'?"