جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 75

Eli’s POVEverything grows if you wait.Mama said that.She said it when we planted the seeds and I was not sure they would come back and she said it takes time but they will.She was right.They came back.All of them.I check every morning. I have the stick for checking. The stick is important. You have to look carefully at each one and make sure they are still there and still growing because things need to be checked and I am the one who checks them.Dada helps.Dada is good at looking carefully. He crouches all the way down which is the right way to look at things that are small. Some people look from too far up and miss things. Dada does not miss things.Mama also looks carefully.Mama looks at everything carefully. I have noticed this. She looks at me for a long time sometimes. Not in a worried way. In a way that is like checking. Making sure I am still there.I do the same thing to her.Still here, she says.Still here is the right answer.Ree is coming back.Cole told me this

Damien’s POV The ruling came on a Thursday. Six weeks after the withdrawal. The Council review had continued as Cole had said it would and Elder Maren had been as good as her word about the complete picture being weighted properly. I read the ruling with Selene beside me at the kitchen table. Eli was in the garden. Ria was with them. Cole was in the war room. The house was doing its ordinary morning things around us while we read something that was not ordinary. The ruling was thorough. Brennan Voss had been found to have engaged in a deliberate long-term campaign to destabilise the legitimate succession of this pack. The evidence established his connection to Hale’s territorial operation. The evidence established his knowledge of Selene’s location during the two and a half years of her amnesia. The evidence established his direction of Rowan’s observational assignment. The ruling did not use words like evil or malicious. It used words like calculated and deliberate and sustain

Lena’s POV Summer came to the estate the way it always did. I knew this now. I remembered it. Not just the way I had been relearning everything but in the deep way of things that had always been true and were available again. Summer here was specific. The quality of light in the afternoons. The way the grounds smelled in the early morning before the heat settled. The particular sound of the estate in July when the windows were open and the air moved through rooms that had been closed all winter. I knew all of it. Not perfectly. Not completely. There were still gaps and there would always be gaps and I had made my peace with the gaps some months ago. But I knew enough. I knew enough to be here fully. The garden was extraordinary. This was Eli’s word for it. Extraordinary. She had acquired it from somewhere, possibly Mara, possibly a book, and had deployed it with precision ever since. The seeds had come back. All of them. And then more had been planted and those had come back