WREN 11

I lasted until dusk.

I'd lain on the guest room floor for hours with my back against the wall and my eyes on the door, because the bed was too soft and because that's where I could see who came in. Around six, three black cars came up the drive with riders on both sides, and I watched from the window as men in dark coats unloaded from them. One of them was taller than the rest. He stopped at the foot of the steps and looked straight up at the house, as if he was counting the windows.

Then the front doors shut, and the noise from downstairs settled into the soft steady murmur of a formal evening. Cutlery. Laughter that had been practiced.

I couldn't stay in that room. It wasn't dramatic. My body had simply had enough of walls.

There was one place I hadn't checked.

I took the servants' stairs, which nobody watched that night, and went out through the scullery into the east garden. I didn't need a light. My feet remembered the path, the loose flagstone and the place where the gravel turned to moss. The rain had thinned to a mist. The air smelled of wet earth and something green, and for the first time since Harrow Ridge, I took a full breath.

The greenhouse stood where it always had, at the far end of the kitchen garden, glass panes gone silver in the last of the light.

Mama and I built that place. Not the structure, but everything in it. I was nine when she first put a trowel in my hand. There were long benches of feverfew and valerian, willow bark drying in bundles, a whole shelf of foxglove she wouldn't let anyone else touch. She'd taught me to steep chamomile for the girl who can't sleep and mullein for the chest. She'd held my hands in hers once and said, *A healer's hands are never cold, Wren. Warm them before you touch anyone who's hurting.*

It was the only place in that house that had ever been just ours.

She kept the door locked because of the foxglove, and the key lived under a loose brick by the third step. I crouched, feeling in the dark. My fingers found the edge of the brick and lifted it.

The key was there.

Something in my chest let go, stupid and hopeful. *It's still here*, I thought. *If she kept the key where it was, maybe she kept the rest.*

The lock turned easily. The hinges didn't squeak. That should have told me something. They'd been oiled.

I pushed the door open and the smell hit me, and it was wrong. Not soil and green stems. Lemon polish. Lilies in a cut-glass vase.

I stood in the doorway and didn't move.

There was a piano where the long bench used to stand. A black grand, lid polished so bright I could see the dark shape of myself in it. Sheer curtains hung over the glass. There was a rug on the stone floor and a chaise with a folded blanket, an easel by the far wall with a half-finished watercolor on it, signed in the corner in a round, careful hand. *C.H.*

The shelves were gone. The benches were gone. The foxglove, the mullein, the years of it.

I walked to the potting-shed post, because that was the only other thing I could think to check. Every birthday since I was eight, Mama had stood me against it with a book on my head and made a pencil mark. Wren, 9. Wren, 10. Wren, 11. She would write the year beside each one in her slanting hand, and then she'd kiss the top of my head and say, *You're going to be taller than your brother.*

The post was smooth. Someone had sanded it and varnished it. There were four small nail holes near the top where the marks had been.

I put my thumb over the place where *Wren, 11* used to be.

I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough for the mist to turn back into rain. Long enough that when the lamps came on, I hadn't even heard the door.

"Wren?"

Ezra stood in the entrance with Celeste beside him, both of them dressed for dinner. Ezra in a black suit, Celeste in pale green, her hair pinned up. A maid hovered behind them, wide-eyed. Someone had seen a figure in the garden.

"I was going to tell you." Celeste's voice was thin and quick. "Mama said, after the first winter, the frost got into the plants and everything died, and she thought I needed somewhere quiet to practice, and I said no, it's the herb room, it's Wren's, but she said—" Her hand went to her throat. "Oh, Wren, I didn't know. I *swear* I didn't know it mattered so much. I'll move everything. Tonight. I'll have them take the piano out first thing—"

"Cece."

"—I don't need it, I can practice anywhere—"

Ezra had stopped listening. He was looking at the room, slowly, the way you look at a photograph of someone you used to know. His eyes moved across the piano, the easel, and came to rest on the post.

He didn't have to ask what used to be there. He'd been in this greenhouse a hundred times. He'd held the book on my head, some years, when Mama's hands were too unsteady.

"This was—" His voice caught. "The herb room. I walked past this every week." He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. "I never even noticed. Wren, I didn't—"

Celeste made a small sound. It wasn't quite a sob.

Ezra turned.

It took about four seconds. I counted, because I counted everything. His face changed, the guilt sliding off it and sliding onto her, and his hand went to her back. "Hey. Hey. It's not your fault, Cece. Nobody's blaming you."

"But it was hers—"

"Nobody's moving anything." He glanced at me, and I saw the effort it cost him. "We'll figure something out."

Guilt is heavy. But it goes where the crying is, and I had never been good at crying in front of people.

"Keep it," I said.

They both looked at me.

"The room. The piano. Keep it. I'm not here to take anything back."

"Wren, that isn't—" Celeste began.

"I mean it." I said it quietly, because there was nothing in me left to raise my voice with. "I didn't come home to reclaim a room. I came because Mama's unwell, and I wanted to be near her. I'll stay while she needs me. That's all."

"That's all," Ezra repeated slowly.

"When she's better, I'll leave."

For a moment he just stared. Then something moved at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile. It was the look you give a child who announces she's running away to live in the woods.

"Leave," he said. "And go where, exactly?"

"I don't know yet. Not here."

"Wren." He let out a breath. "You're angry. You've every right to be, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But you've just walked out of two years in that place, and you're tired, and you aren't thinking clearly. In a month you'll feel differently."

"Maybe," I said, because arguing would only make him lean in.

Then I looked at him, because I wanted him to hear it properly.

"I'm not going to stay in this family forever, Alpha. I thought you should hear it from me."

The smile came the rest of the way. Patient. Indulgent. The one he used to give me when I was ten and swore I'd be the first girl Alpha of the Ironwood pack.

"Sure," he said.

I let him have it. Some things only get believed after they've already happened.