Chapter 2

The porch light was already burning when Wren slowed to a stop at the tree line, like Grandma Ruth had left it on every single night for a year, just in case.

"Nora?" The screen door banged against the frame before I had even finished shifting back. A blanket dropped around my bare shoulders before I could get a word out, and her eyes went straight to my face, reading it the way she used to read weather in the clouds.

"He found his mate." My voice cracked down the middle of the sentence. "Tonight. In front of everyone."

She didn't say I told you so. She didn't say anything at all. She just wrapped both arms around me and held on until my knees buckled and I finally let the sobs come, loud and ugly, nothing like the quiet, careful crying I'd done in front of a crowd that never once turned to look.

"Come inside," she said once my breathing had evened out. "You're freezing, and I've got a kettle that's been wanting an excuse to boil for weeks."

Her kitchen smelled the way it always had: rosemary hanging in dry bundles above the stove, honey warm from her own hives, the ghost of an apple pie baked two days ago still clinging to the air. I sat at her table with my knees pulled to my chest and told her everything: the truck, the dress comment, the way Ren's whole body had turned like a compass needle finding north. She never once cut in. She just poured tea and let me talk until my voice gave out.

"You don't have to go back tonight." She set a steaming mug in front of me. "Or tomorrow. Or next month, if you don't want to."

"Mom is going to lose it."

"Your mother and I have plenty we don't agree on." Something crossed her face, quick and shadowed, gone before I could ask what it meant. I filed it away without knowing yet that I would spend the next year collecting small shadowed looks like that one, a whole drawer full of them, until they finally added up to a shape. "But you are always welcome here, Nora. That was never in question."

My mother's voice went sharp and clipped over the phone the next morning, demanding to know why I'd run to the one woman she hadn't spoken a word to in years. I sat on the porch steps holding the phone away from my ear until she ran out of breath. My father, when I finally reached him alone, just said, take whatever time you need, in that low, steady voice of his, and somehow that did more for me than anything my mother had said in ten minutes straight.

A few weeks turned into a year without either of us really deciding it that way.

Grandma Ruth gave me the small room that looked out over her garden and never once pushed me to be anything other than exactly as broken as I was. Two weeks in, she walked me across the field to meet her neighbor, a broad, grey stubbled man everyone just called Chris, arms crossed over a chest like a barrel, sizing me up the second I stepped into view.

"Your grandmother says you need to learn how to fight." His eyes swept me head to toe. "She's right. You're small. Small doesn't mean weak if you're smart about it."

"I don't want to learn how to fight. I want to forget my own name for a while."

"Fine." He shrugged and turned back toward his barn. "Come back when you're done feeling sorry for yourself. I'm in that field every morning at six."

I showed up at six the next morning, mostly out of spite, arms crossed, jaw set. Spite is an underrated place to start rebuilding a person from. It got me out of bed on the mornings grief alone never could have.

That spite turned into something else across the months that followed. Chris taught me to use my size instead of fighting it: speed, angles, where to put my weight so a wolf twice my size couldn't just walk through me. He ran drills until my legs shook under me, sparred until I could read a shift in someone's shoulders half a second before their fist moved, and never let me sit down and sulk once the gloves went on.

Grandma Ruth taught me other things, her hands guiding mine through soil, showing me how to work a hive without getting stung more than once or twice, how to let quiet sit in a room instead of filling it with noise for the sake of noise. She never brought up Ren unless I said his name first. Most days, I didn't.

One evening, months into that quiet, I asked her the question I'd been circling for weeks. "Why did you and Mom really stop speaking?"

Her hands stilled over the bread dough. For a moment I thought she wouldn't answer at all. "Some choices follow a person their whole life, Nora. Your mother made one when she was young, and it cost her more than she ever let herself admit. I loved her too much to watch her pretend it didn't." She went back to kneading before I could ask what choice, and something in the set of her shoulders told me not to push. Not yet.

I turned eighteen in that cottage, ate cake made from her own apples still warm from the oven, and didn't think about that clearing once, not the whole day. It felt like a small victory nobody else would ever know to congratulate me for.

My mother called every week at first, always finding a way to slip Ren's name into the conversation, how the bonding ceremony plans were coming along, small details dropped like she thought I needed updates on a wound she should have known better than to keep reopening. I stopped picking up after the first month. My father, I called every Sunday without fail, because he never mentioned Ren unless I brought him up myself. Colt called sometimes too, his voice always a little distracted, circling something he never quite said out loud.

Months in, I noticed his voice had changed. Flatter. Tired in a way twenty shouldn't sound. When I asked, he brushed me off, told me not to worry, and I let it go, even though I'd promised myself I was done letting things slide where my own family was concerned.

By the time a full year had passed, the girl in Grandma Ruth's mirror barely matched the one who'd left that clearing. My hair hung past my waist now. My shoulders had filled out hard with real muscle where soft roundness used to sit. I could hold my own against Chris for full minutes at a stretch, which earned me a single gruff nod, more than I'd expected out of him in a year.

I was on the porch eating a sandwich after morning training when my phone lit up with Colt's name. I almost let it ring out. It wasn't a Sunday.

"Hey." I talked around a mouthful of bread. "Everything okay?"

A pause stretched a beat too long on the other end.

"Nora." He never used my full name unless something was wrong, and hearing it now made the sandwich turn to sand in my mouth. "You need to come home."

"Colt, what's going on?"

Another pause, longer this time, like he was bracing himself against something heavy.

"It's Mom." His breath shook audibly through the line. "She's gone, Nora. She died three days ago and I didn't know how to tell you until right now."

The sandwich slipped out of my fingers and hit the porch boards. I didn't even hear it land.

"How." My voice came out as barely more than air. "How did she."

"I can't do this on the phone. Please. Just come home. Dad needs you. I need you. There's a lot you don't know yet, and none of it is good."

I looked up and found Grandma Ruth already standing in the doorway, dish towel forgotten in one hand, watching my face like she'd seen a ghost pass behind my eyes. Whatever she saw there told her everything before I managed a single word.

"We're going home." My own voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. "Today."