Chapter 3: Rejected, Still Working

By the time Cerys reached hydroponics, the celebration had followed her downstairs.

Two of her coworkers were arguing over who had been the first to clap for Rhys. Someone had left a wrapped portion of supper on her worktable. Cerys stood in the doorway, wondering how they could have come back to work so easily. Then she saw the trays waiting for her.

“You missed the best part,” one of them said. “Someone tried to make him give another speech.”

“He'd have hated that.”

“There she is. We were beginning to think the new Alpha had stolen you for the day,” someone said.

Cerys picked up the food. She had not eaten since morning. “He's got half the silo waiting to congratulate him.”

Her coworker laughed and went back to the growing beds. The joke had landed exactly as she intended. It left her feeling worse.

She set the food down unopened.

A row of greens near the far wall had begun to droop. Cerys had worried about them yesterday; the damage was small, but it would matter if no one noticed it while she was gone.

She told her coworker which plants she was concerned about. He looked again and agreed.

“You caught it,” he said.

“Not early enough to make it pretty.”

“Pretty isn't the job.”

She managed a smile. The plants would be looked after; her coworker knew what he was doing.

For the next hour, Cerys worked beside him. She caught herself reaching for a joke meant for Rhys when a tray refused to sit straight. She swallowed it and helped finish the row instead.

Her coworker was still talking about the appointment.

“Do you think he'll keep his temper when everyone starts asking him for favors?”

“He'll hear them out,” Cerys said.

“That wasn't the question.”

“No.” She adjusted the tray until it stayed put. “It wasn't.”

Rhys could be impatient, but he'd spent years taking people seriously even when he disagreed with them. She wanted to say the pack had made a good choice in the old way, as someone who would be there when Rhys came home.

“He'll do well,” she said, and turned back to the plants.

When the other agronomists began putting their work aside, Cerys pulled out the notes she always left before Wolf Night. She had kept them in the same folder for years. The pages from last month were still there, marked with changes made while she was recovering.

She took a clean sheet.

She filled the first page, then its margins. Whoever took her place would know what worried her, not just what looked wrong. She kept going until she had covered the decisions she wouldn't be there to make.

Her writing slowed when she reached the space where she usually added a note for the day after the moon.

Last month, Rhys had found her awake in bed and read that page aloud, putting on an offended voice whenever she told her coworkers not to fuss over her. She remembered trying to steal the paper back. He had held it out of reach until she laughed, then settled beside her and read the rest properly.

She pressed the pen hard enough to dent the page.

“Cerys?”

Her coworker paused beside her on his way out. He glanced at the sheets spread across her table.

“Still doing those? We can manage for a day without you.”

“I know.”

“That's not what these look like,” her coworker said.

He was smiling, but he didn't take the papers away. He had seen her come back from enough Wolf Nights to know why she left them. He had also helped keep the growing rooms running when she was too hurt to stand here herself.

Cerys lifted the top sheet so he could see the notes beneath it. “If I have to be gone longer than a day, you'll want the rest.”

His smile faltered.

She regretted saying it that way. She hadn't meant to make him picture another morning when someone carried her home.

“I'm not saying you can't do my job,” she added. “I just don't want to leave you my mess.”

“It's not a mess.”

“There's a whole page about one tray,” someone said.

“That's your usual mess.”

He gave her shoulder a light bump with his own and left her to it. She let herself breathe after he was gone.

She finished the notes and left the folder where her coworkers would find it if she didn't return. It was too much for an ordinary absence. Wolf Night had never felt ordinary to her.

The growing room had emptied by the time she heard Rhys's footsteps.

She knew them before she looked up. For one reckless second, relief rose in her chest. She had been holding herself together all afternoon, and here was the person she would have gone to afterward. Then she remembered what he had said.

Rhys stopped beside the worktable. He was no longer surrounded by people, but he still wore the expression he'd had when she made him answer her in the passage.

“I thought you'd be here,” he said.

“I'm nearly done.”

His gaze moved over the open folder. “You didn't have to stay so late.”

“The moon doesn't move because we've had a bad day.”

He flinched. Cerys wished she hadn't said it. She was tired of hurting him, and more tired of wanting to make him feel better about hurting her.

“Have you eaten?” he asked.

She looked at the unopened food beside her notes. He followed her gaze. Before today, he would have sat on the edge of the table and waited until she'd eaten half of it, arguing with her about nothing important because he knew she would keep working if he gave her the chance.

“Cerys.” He came closer, his hand lifting toward her arm. “You don't have to do this alone.”

Her body had already begun to lean toward him. She caught herself and stepped back.

His hand stayed in the air for an instant, then fell. She could see that he'd meant the touch without thinking. That made it harder to bear.

She wanted to set her forehead against his chest and let him tell her they had both had a terrible afternoon. She didn't move.

Rhys glanced at the folder between them. “I was only trying to—”

“I know what you were trying to do.”

She closed the folder and kept her hand on it, not because he would take it, but because she needed somewhere to put her hand other than in his.

“Don't act like breaking up with me changed nothing.”