Chapter 77 — We Need Her

The meeting that produced Hallie’s letter began with three separate problems. Austin had expected one. By the time the third person finished speaking, he had stopped pretending the failures were unrelated.

A work rotation had been changed without the supply schedule changing with it. Two disputes had reached leadership because the people handling them were working from different decisions. A stores adjustment had been approved, but the person arranging the next week’s labor had never been told.

None of it was catastrophic. Together, it was becoming a system. Austin stood at the end of the table.

“Who is carrying decisions between functions?”

No one answered immediately. That answer was worse than any name. One of the older members of Bellamy Creek’s leadership shifted a stack of notes.

“We split that work.”

“Between whom?”

“Whoever owns the problem.”

Austin looked at him.

“That is not what I asked.”

The man exhaled.

“Rotations go through one person. Stores changes through another. Pack disputes through whoever is handling the people involved.”

“And when one decision affects all three?”

Silence again. Austin straightened. He knew the shape of the problem now.

The pack had not lost a single position when Hallie left. It had lost the person who noticed that one conversation changed the next three. For years, that labor had been so familiar that Austin had barely separated it from Hallie herself.

She remembered who had agreed to what. She knew when a schedule change would leave the wrong people working at the wrong time. She caught arguments before they reached him because she knew which earlier decision had caused them.

Everyone had called it preparation. Future Luna work. The label had made it easy to treat the value as something that belonged to Hallie’s eventual place beside him instead of work she was already doing.

Now Hallie was gone, and Bellamy Creek had distributed the pieces among competent people who kept completing their individual tasks. The whole was still failing. Austin turned to the next report.

“I can take the cross-function decisions until we stabilize.”

A woman across the table shook her head.

“You already are.”

Austin looked at her. She did not retreat.

“You took two rotation disputes yesterday. You reviewed the stores correction this morning. You missed the boundary report while you were doing it.”

“I read it afterward.”

“Afterward.”

Austin’s jaw tightened. Another member of the group spoke.

“We need you doing Alpha work.”

“This is Alpha work.”

“Some of it.”

Austin looked around the table. No one seemed eager to challenge him. That made the agreement in their faces worse.

He had spent days stepping into gaps because he could see them widening. Every time he closed one, something else waited.

He could keep doing it. He could also slowly turn the role of Alpha into a collection of problems other people were capable of solving if someone coordinated them properly. Austin sat down.

“Then give me another solution.”

The older man looked at the notes.

“We already had one.”

Austin knew the name before anyone said it. He still hated hearing it.

“Hallie.”

The mate bond pulled hard beneath his ribs. Austin ignored it.

“This is not about the bond.”

“No one said it was.”

The woman across the table folded her hands.

“She did this work.”

“She did parts of it.”

“She connected the parts.”

The distinction cut cleanly. Austin looked down.

He could argue that Hallie had been trained for Luna responsibilities. He could say her involvement had only worked because everyone expected her to stand beside the Alpha someday. He could insist Bellamy Creek should be able to replace one person.

None of those arguments would fix the reports. Austin leaned back.

“What exactly are you proposing?”

“Ask her to come temporarily.”

“To do what?”

“Stabilize the coordination. Show us what is being missed. Help us put the work back into a structure that does not depend on you personally carrying every loose end.”

Another person added, “She knows where the old pressure points are.”

Austin’s mouth tightened.

“She knew them.”

“Then she is still the best person to tell us which ones we rebuilt badly.”

No one mentioned Grant. No one suggested asking Cedar Draw to solve Bellamy Creek’s problem. They were asking for Hallie because Hallie had done the work.

Austin stared at the reports. Bellamy Creek had functioned better with her. He had avoided saying that even to himself.

Her mate bond had nothing to do with it. Neither did the future Luna title everyone once assumed she would carry. Hallie had been useful in ways Austin had treated as part of a future role instead of work happening in the present.

When he sacrificed the woman, Bellamy Creek lost the work too. Austin let the truth sit in the room.

“We need her.”

No one smiled. Good. Austin pulled a blank page toward him.

“The request goes to Hallie directly.”

The older man nodded.

“Not to Grant.”

“No.”

Austin’s pen paused above the page.

“And it says temporary assistance. We are asking for help with the operational problems. Nothing else.”

The woman across the table watched him.

“Will she come?”

Austin had no right to answer that.

“I don’t know.”

Hallie could say no. Bellamy Creek could need her and still have no claim on her. Austin began outlining the failures clearly enough that she could judge the request for herself.

Rotations. Supplies. Disputes.

Decisions not traveling between the people responsible for carrying them out. He did not write that the pack missed her. He did not write that he missed her.

Neither belonged in the request. When the draft was finished, Austin read it once. Then he authorized it.

The page left the room in someone else’s hand. Austin remained at the table. If Hallie returned, even briefly, she would see every place where people had divided up what she used to hold together.

She would see the meetings he had allowed to become overloaded and the gaps left by work he had once treated as naturally hers because he thought she would always be there to do it. For months, Austin had been forced to understand what losing Hallie meant to him.

Now Bellamy Creek was about to show her what losing Hallie had meant to the pack.