Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Elias
The days after the rejection moved strangely.
Not like the hospital, where time had been measured in vitals and visiting hours and the slow healing of surgical wounds.
This was different. This was waking up in Vera's guest room with the beige walls and the lavender smell of her fabric softener and the knowledge that I had nowhere else to be.
I did not leave the house for nine days.
Vera brought me meals on a tray at first, until I told her to stop, my voice coming out flatter than I intended, and she flinched slightly and said of course, of course.
After that I came to the kitchen when she called, sat at her small table with the yellow placemats, ate what she had made without tasting it.
She was trying.
I could see her trying, the careful way she asked if I wanted anything from the store, the hesitation before she mentioned something she'd heard from a friend, the way she watched my face when she thought I wasn't looking.
She had never been built for this kind of grief.
She was practical, efficient, good at forms and phone calls and the logistics of emergencies.
The shapeless aftermath was beyond her. She knew it too.
I saw it in the way her shoulders tightened sometimes when she found me in a room she hadn't expected me to be in, the small sigh she let out when she thought I was asleep.
On the tenth day I went outside. The air was cold and sharp and the sky was the flat grey of January in Maren, the kind of grey that pressed down and stayed down, that made the streetlights come on at three in the afternoon and kept them on until morning.
I walked to the corner and back. Forty-three steps each way.
I counted them, the numbers anchoring me to something specific, something I could hold.
When I returned, Vera was standing in the doorway with her arms wrapped around herself, her breath showing in small clouds.
"Do you want to talk about it?" she asked, and I could hear the hope in her voice that I would say no, that we could maintain this pretense of normalcy, that I would not make her navigate waters she didn't know how to chart.
"No." I stepped past her into the warmth of the hall, smelled the coffee she had been drinking, the particular bitterness of it. "Thank you."
She nodded, once, and stepped back, and I went to my room and closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed and listened to her footsteps in the kitchen, the familiar sounds of someone trying to occupy themselves with ordinary things.
The gossip found me anyway. It came through Vera, mostly, though she tried to filter it, her face going still sometimes when she answered the phone, her voice dropping to that careful register people used when they were managing information.
Trent brought more.
Trent was her husband, a man who had never quite approved of my presence in their lives even before I became permanent, who had made comments about the inconvenience of relatives who became responsibilities, who worked at the bank and heard things and brought them home with a particular relish that he tried to disguise as concern.
"The Steele Pack has already been seen with someone new," he said one evening, three weeks after the rejection, his fork scraping against his plate in a way that set my teeth on edge.
We were at dinner, the three of us, an arrangement that had become routine without anyone formally deciding it, Trent at the head of the table where he had started sitting once it became clear I would be staying longer than a weekend.
"An omega from Easton. Young. Apparently very promising. "
Vera's fork stopped halfway to her mouth. "Trent."
"What? He should know. Everyone else does.
" Trent looked at me directly, something assessing in his expression, calculating.
"They're saying it was handled badly. The way they ended it.
People are talking about how Carter delivered the news, clinical like that.
Cold." He paused, took a bite, chewed slowly.
"But they're also saying that everyone understands.
An Omega who can't carry. What pack would want that?
It's not personal. It's just... the reality of the situation. "
The words landed precisely where they were meant to.
I felt them in my chest, a small sharp pressure behind my sternum.
I set my fork down and looked at my plate, the chicken Vera had made with some kind of sauce, the vegetables arranged neatly beside it, everything looking like normal food in a normal house with normal people having a normal conversation.
"Trent." Vera's voice had gone sharp, edged with something that might have been anger or might have been embarrassment.
"I'm just saying what people are saying. He's going to hear it eventually. Better from family," Trent said, though I could see the amusement flash in his eyes.
I stood up, my chair scraped against the floor, too loud in the sudden quiet. "Thank you for dinner, Vera. I'm going to turn in early."
"Elias." She started to rise, her hand reaching toward me, then stopping, hovering in the air between us.
"I know." I met her eyes so she would understand I was not angry with her, that I recognized the effort even as I recognized its insufficiency. "I need to be alone right now. Please."
She held my gaze for a beat, her eyes carrying something I couldn't name, and then she nodded. I went down the hall and into the guest room with the beige walls and the drawer with the red clip still sealed inside.
I closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed and listened to their voices through the wall, low and tense, Vera's rising once before dropping again to something controlled, Trent's defensive, the rhythm of an argument that wasn't about me but was entirely about me.
The inheritance had settled. The house on Carver Road was mine, technically, along with what savings Pop and Nana had accumulated, a number that Trent knew precisely and that I had seen him calculating behind his eyes when he looked at me now.
I was a burden that had become a fixture.
A seventeen-year-old Omega with a damaged reproductive system and a house he couldn't live in and grief that made him difficult to be around.
I could see the shape of what I was to him.
I had always been good at reading what people were not saying.
I made myself very small. Very still. It was the only strategy I had.
My eighteenth birthday fell on a Tuesday, a little over three weeks after the rejection.
Vera made a cake. A small one, lemon with white frosting, the kind I had mentioned once in passing that Nana used to make in the summer, and I did not know whether to be grateful that she remembered or sad that she had needed to try.
She set it on the table after dinner with a candle in it, the single kind you buy in a multipack, and when I looked at it I thought about the birthday that was supposed to happen, the one I had imagined without quite forming it into a full picture, Carter asking formally, the three of them, the thing becoming real.
The picture I had not known I was carrying until I needed to set it down.
I blew out the candle. Vera clapped, a small sound in the quiet kitchen.
Trent said happy birthday from his chair without looking up from his phone, his voice the particular flat register of someone discharging an obligation.
I ate a slice of cake and it was good, the lemon sharp and the frosting sweet, Nana's recipe exactly, and that was almost the worst part.
"Thank you," I said, and meant it, and Vera's face did something complicated and she nodded and started clearing the plates.
I was eighteen years old. I was supposed to be somewhere else entirely.
I started going out after that. Not because I wanted to, but because staying in the house with Trent's glances and Vera's worried hovering had become its own kind of exposure, a performance of recovery that I didn't have the energy to maintain.
Better to be outside, where the cold kept people moving and the grey sky matched something inside me and I could be invisible in the way that people walking alone in winter become invisible, just another figure moving through the grey.
Maren was not large. I had lived here since I was five.
I knew the streets, the storefronts, the particular quality of the light on the bank at four in the afternoon when the sun was already thinking about setting.
I had walked these sidewalks with Nana on errands, carrying the bags while she talked to people she knew, had waited outside the pharmacy while Pop picked up prescriptions, had grown up being known in the way that small towns know their own, the long slow knowledge that builds quietly over years.
Now I was known differently.
I saw it in the looks. The pause in conversation when I entered the pharmacy to buy toothpaste, the clerk's eyes flicking to my face and then away, too quickly, her hands moving faster at the register as if speed could prevent acknowledgment.
The way Mrs. Patterson at the grocery store became very focused on scanning my items, not meeting my eyes, her mouth pressed in a line that was meant to be sympathetic but landed as pity.
The whispers that started and stopped as I passed, the sudden silence in the aisle when I turned a corner, the resumed conversation pitched slightly lower, carried on breath that showed in the cold air.
The Steele Pack didn't want him.
Did you hear? The accident, and then the doctor, and then
Such a shame. He was a sweet boy.
Well. You understand. What pack would…