Chapter 3: Welcome Back

(Amara's POV)

"Back door," I whispered. "Still the plan."

"Still the plan," Maya whispered back, like we were planning a heist instead of sneaking up on my own mother.

We crept along the side of the house, past my father's workshop saw running, sawdust smell thick in the wet air and up the back porch steps. I eased the screen door open an inch at a time, wincing at every creak, Maya filming on her phone with the concentration of a war correspondent.

My mother stood at the stove, back to me, stirring something that smelled like Sunday dinner on a Tuesday.

"Mom."

She didn't turn around at first just went very still, wooden spoon frozen mid-stir, like her body needed a second to confirm what her ears had just told her.

"Amara?"

"Hi, Mom."

She spun around so fast the spoon clattered into the pot, and then she was crossing the kitchen faster than I'd ever seen a fifty-six-year-old woman move, and then her arms were around me so tight I felt my ribs complain.

"You're early! You said Friday! I had a whole I was going to make a cake, I had a schedule"

"I wanted to surprise you."

"You terrified me, that's what you did, my heart nearly stopped" She pulled back to look at me, hands on my face, eyes already wet. "Look at you. Look at you, you're so thin, are you eating, of course you're not eating, you're a doctor, doctors never eat"

"I eat, Mom."

"You look tired."

"I flew for fourteen hours."

"You look tired, Amara, that's different from flight-tired, that's..." She stopped herself, pressed her lips together, visibly reeling it back in. "I'm just glad you're home. I'm so glad you're home."

"Me too."

Behind her, the back door banged open, and my father filled the doorway in his work coveralls, sawdust in his grey hair, a slow grin spreading across his face like sunrise.

"There's my girl."

"Hi, Daddy."

He crossed the kitchen and folded me into a hug that smelled exactly like it always had cedar and engine grease and something warm underneath that I'd never found anywhere else in five years of trying.

"Dr. Hayes," he said into my hair. "Can you believe that. My daughter, a doctor."

"Believe it. I've got the loans to prove it."

He laughed, pulled back, held my shoulders at arm's length the same way my mother had. "You good? Really good, not just good for phone calls?"

"I'm good, Dad."

He studied my face a second too long, the way he always could tell when I was editing the truth down to something easier to swallow. I used to hate that about him. Right then I was grateful for it, because it meant I didn't have to say the rest out loud yet.

"We'll talk," he said quietly, just to me. "Whatever it is."

"There's nothing..."

"Amara."

"Later," I said. "I promise. Later."

He nodded, let it go, and swept me back into the kitchen where my mother had already abandoned the stove entirely to pull out her phone.

"I have to call Rosalind. And your aunt. And the pack secretary, so they can put something in the newsletter"

"Mom, please don't put me in the newsletter."

"You're a hero! A doctor returning home! People should know!"

"I will actually leave again."

"You will not." She was already dialing. "Hello, Rosalind? You will NOT believe who just walked through my kitchen door"

Maya caught my eye over my mother's shoulder and mouthed, told you ninety seconds, grinning like she'd won something. I rolled my eyes, but I was smiling too, for the first time since the garage, like some of the ground I'd lost on the drive over had been handed back to me in small pieces.

By nightfall the whole pack knew. That was the thing about Silver Creek news didn't travel, it detonated, and within three hours my mother's kitchen had somehow become a receiving line.

Old Soren came first, smelling like pipe tobacco, pumping my hand like he was trying to start an engine. "Dr. Hayes! Heard you fixed a man's heart with your bare hands."

"I did surgery. With instruments."

"Modest, too. Your mother raised you right."

Lydia came next, arms full of a casserole dish she insisted she'd "just happened to have," which fooled no one, least of all me. "I need the real story," she whispered, steering me toward the corner. "Not the newsletter version. The actual one."

"There's no real story. I went to school, I became a doctor, I came home."

"That's not a story, that's a résumé." She squeezed my arm. "You look good, by the way. Glowing, almost."

"I flew fourteen hours and cried in a garage an hour ago. I promise I'm not glowing."

She laughed like I'd made a joke. I let her think I had.

"Is it true you performed an actual surgery during your residency?" she pressed. "Like, with your own two hands, no supervisor?"

"Eventually, yes. Not on day one."

"That's terrifying. I could never. I nearly fainted giving blood at the pack drive last spring."

"It gets easier. You stop thinking about it as a person and start thinking about it as a problem you're solving."

"That sounds like something a serial killer would say."

"I promise it's just medicine."

"If you say so, Doctor." She said the word like it still didn't quite fit me yet, and honestly, some days, neither did I.

By the fourth round of welcome home, we missed you, look how grown up all of it warm, all of it genuine, all of it somehow making my chest tighter instead of looser, I slipped out to the back porch for air, Maya trailing a respectful two steps behind.

"You holding up?" she asked.

"I keep waiting for someone to say his name."

"No one's going to say his name tonight. Everyone in that kitchen already knows what happened. They're being polite."

"That's almost worse."

"Welcome to small-pack life."

I leaned against the porch railing, cool night air finally cutting through the kitchen's warmth, and let myself breathe for the first time all evening.

"Your mom's going to want you at the pack bonfire tomorrow," Maya said. "Everyone will. First official appearance and all that."

"I'm not ready for everyone."

"No one's ever ready for everyone. You just show up and let your face do the lying for you until it isn't lying anymore."

"That's bleak."

"That's pack life. Very bleak, very communal." She bumped my shoulder with hers. "You don't have to go tomorrow. We could just hide here. Watch bad TV. Let your mom feed us until we can't move."

It was tempting. Genuinely, deeply tempting.

"I have to go eventually," I said. "Better to rip it off fast."

"Rip what off fast?"

"Seeing him. In person. With her. Better to just do it. Get the first look over with, so it's not hanging over every single day after."

Maya was quiet a moment, studying my face in the porch light.

"You're sure?"

"No," I admitted. "But I'm doing it anyway."

"That's basically your whole personality, you know that?"

"It's gotten me this far."

She smiled, small and a little sad, and looped her arm through mine the way she had at the airport that felt like three lifetimes ago instead of one afternoon.

"Tomorrow, then," she said. "The bonfire. I'll be right next to you the whole time. If anyone so much as looks at you wrong, I will personally start a fight I cannot win."

"That's oddly comforting."

"I contain multitudes."

Behind us, through the kitchen window, I could hear my mother laughing at something, the warm clatter of dishes, the particular music of a house full of people who loved me and had no idea what tomorrow was going to cost.

I looked out at the dark tree line past the yard, toward pack land, toward wherever he was tonight maybe at the garage, maybe at the pack house, maybe lying awake beside a woman who used to pour drinks on my head for sport.

Tomorrow I would see him. Really see him. Not across a garage window, not in Maya's careful, cushioned version of the truth.

Tomorrow, for the first time in five years, Damon Blackwood was going to look up and find me standing right in front of him and some small, stubborn, idiot part of my heart still wanted to know exactly what his face would do when he did.