Chapter Five: The Letter

A week passed.

Then another.

I settled into a rhythm that was simple and manageable and asked nothing complicated of me. Wake up. Eat Marta's breakfast. Walk the town. Work the evening shift at the Grey Oak. Sleep. Do it again.

It was not a big life. But it was mine and nobody was taking anything from it and that mattered more than I expected it to.

Donal turned out to be a decent man to work for. He did not talk much but he was fair and he paid on time and when a customer gave me trouble one evening he appeared at my shoulder so quickly and so quietly that the man nearly fell off his stool in fright. Nothing was said. Nothing needed to be. The customer apologized and left and Donal went back to the counter like nothing had happened.

I worked harder after that.

The other person I came to know was a girl named Peta who worked the morning shift at the inn and who had the kind of personality that filled a room without trying. She was small and quick and talked constantly and somehow never said anything that felt empty. She had grown up in the town, half wolf half human, and she knew everyone and everything and was completely unbothered by all of it.

She adopted me the way some people just do. Without announcement. One morning she simply sat down across from me at breakfast and started talking and never really stopped and I found that I did not mind.

"You are looking better," she told me one morning at the end of my second week. She said it plainly, the way she said everything.

"Better than what?" I asked.

"Better than when you arrived." She tilted her head. "You had this look when you came in. Like something had just hit you and you were still deciding whether to fall down."

I looked at my cup. "That is fairly accurate."

She did not push for more and I did not offer it and we sat in comfortable quiet for a moment before she started talking about something else entirely. That was what I liked about Peta. She saw things clearly and then let them be.

The letter arrived on a Thursday.

Marta brought it up to my room in the evening after my shift, holding it the way you hold something you are not sure about. It had my name on the front in my mother's handwriting.

I sat on the edge of my bed and held it for a long time before I opened it.

My mother's letters always smelled faintly like the kitchen at home. This one did too and that small familiar thing hit me somewhere behind my ribs before I even read a word.

She wrote that she and my father were well. She wrote that the pack had moved on quickly, the way packs always do, and that the ceremony was already becoming something people referred to in passing rather than at length. She wrote that my father had taken on extra work and that the garden was doing well and that the old dog who lived next door had finally had her puppies.

Normal things. Safe things.

Then near the end the tone shifted.

She wrote that Kael and Selene had made their arrangement official. That there had been a small announcement in front of the pack. That Selene had stood on the Alpha platform and smiled the whole time.

I folded that part of the letter over so I could not see it and kept reading.

Then came the part that made me go still.

My mother wrote that she needed to tell me something. That she had been holding it back, trying to find the right time, and that the right time had never come and now she was putting it in a letter because she did not know when she would see me again.

She wrote that I needed to know the truth about where I came from.

She wrote that she was not my birth mother.

I read that line three times.

The room was very quiet.

She wrote that she and my father had taken me in when I was three days old, brought to them by a woman they did not know, a woman who was frightened and injured and who made them swear to keep me safe and tell no one. The woman had left before morning. My mother had never seen her again.

She wrote that she did not know the whole story. But she wrote that the woman who had brought me to them had said one thing before she left.

She had said that I was not ordinary.

She had said that when the time came, I would understand.

My mother wrote that she was sorry for keeping it so long. She wrote that I was her daughter in every way that mattered and that nothing would ever change that. She wrote that she loved me.

The letter ended there.

I sat on the bed in my small plain room with the creaking floorboards and the candle on the table and I held the pages in my hands and I did not move for a very long time.

Not my birth mother.

I turned the words over and over like stones in my palm, looking at them from every side, trying to find the angle that made them feel real. My whole life I had never once questioned it. My mother was my mother. My father was my father. We were quiet and unremarkable and we belonged to Mooncrest the way every other family did.

Except we did not. Except I did not.

My wolf was awake inside me, more awake than she had been in weeks, her attention sharp and directed inward like she was listening to something I could not hear yet.

I pressed my hand flat against my chest.

Not ordinary.

The woman who had brought me as a newborn had said I was not ordinary. And then she had disappeared and my parents had raised me in a wolf pack and never said a word and I had grown up thinking the most remarkable thing that would ever happen to me was finding my mate.

And look how that had turned out.

I almost laughed. It came out strange, half laugh and half something else, and I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and breathed through it.

I thought about going back. For about thirty seconds I genuinely considered it. Going home, sitting down with my mother, asking her everything face to face. But even as I thought it I knew I would not. Going back meant going back to all of it. The pack. The whispers. Selene's smile.

I was not ready for that.

I folded the letter carefully and put it in the front pocket of my bag next to the photograph.

Then I sat in the quiet for a long time and let the new shape of my life settle around me.

Not ordinary.

Fine.

I had never particularly wanted to be ordinary anyway.

But I was going to need answers. Real ones. And something told me quietly and clearly that I was not going to find them here in this small town with its woodsmoke and its narrow streets.

Something was coming.

I could feel it in my wolf, in the way she was sitting inside me now. Alert and waiting.

Like she already knew.