Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
Jared
“Wait a second. Say that again.”
Grady stands in the center of his living room, his weight braced on his good leg, and the lamplight catches the dark gold in his hair. He had invited Emily, Leif, and me over for dinner tonight at the last minute and barely let us get settled before dropping his announcement.
“I’ve been thinking about the living arrangement,” Grady says. “And adding a second story to the cottage, or waiting for a larger house to be designed and built, isn’t practical when this place is already large enough for all four of us right now, with room to grow.”
I bark out a laugh. “It’s about damn time you realized.”
Emily elbows me in the stomach before she turns back to our Beta. “Grady, we can’t just—”
She catalogs the open floor plan, the extra rooms upstairs, and the generous kitchen as if seeing it for the first time, despite having built the damn thing.
Even so, she continues, “I don’t want to crowd you. We can make do with the current arrangement. The cottage isn’t perfect, but—”
“You’re not listening,” Grady cuts in, and her mouth snaps shut. “I’m not offering because it’s the most practical solution for our current needs. I want you here. All of you.”
He pauses, turning fully to Emily. “Permanently.”
When she just gapes at him, Grady limps over and takes her hand. “You proposed to me with a desk—”
“She did what now?” I demand, earning myself another elbow to the gut, this one from Leif.
Grady ignored my interruption. “So now I’m proposing to you with a house. Granted, it’s another thing you built for me, but it’s too much space for one person. I know it’s not the cottage, and that you’ll have to rebuild your garden, and that you may have to share a shop with Blake, but—”
He cuts off as Emily lunges forward and sweeps him off his feet, kissing him senseless.
I clap and whoop, while Leif heads for the kitchen. “There better be wine to celebrate this.”
Grady tears his lips away from Emily. “It’s in the fridge.”
I nudge Emily. “Hey, where’s my proposal?”
Still holding Grady in one arm, she smacks me in the chest. “I let you move in with me, didn’t I?”
“You made me sleep in the guest room,” I protest. “I had to weasel my way into your bed.”
“And you’ll have to go back to weaseling your way in if you ruin this moment,” she growls.
I spin toward our Omega. “Leif, Em is playing favorites!”
He returns with glasses of wine. “She built me a shoe rack and a bookcase, as well as my cabin, so…”
I gape at him. “Betrayal.”
“Sucks to be unfavored.” He holds out one of the glasses. “Drink away your misery.”
I snatch it from his hand. “Oh, I see how it is. Everyone pick on the youngest. But just wait until you’re all senile.”
Emily spins in a slow circle, taking Grady with her, and he seems content to be carried around for the moment.
“We’ll have to go through the cottage and decide what we want to bring over.” She nuzzles our Beta. “And Grady’s bedroom will have to move upstairs.”
“What?” he squawks. “Why?”
“You’re not sleeping on a separate floor from the rest of us.” She glares at him. “I didn’t put in that elevator so you could ignore half of your home.”
“Fine.” His hand on her jaw brings her closer. “Jared can have the guest room on the ground floor.”
“Hey!”
Leif claps me on the shoulder. “No more hogging our Alpha’s bed every night.”
“I’ve changed my mind about all of us living together.”
“Too late,” Grady, Emily, and Leif all chorus.
Over the rest of the week, we pack up Emily’s cottage, going through a decade of living in one place.
Every evening after work, we board the water taxi together, pick up another stack of empty boxes and dinner to-go, and tackle one room at a time.
Emily is methodical.
Borderline ruthless.
In the kitchen, each plate, each pot, each wooden spoon is sorted in seconds, destined to stay or go.
Her cast-iron skillet lands in the keep pile without discussion.
The mismatched mugs from the back of the cabinet end up in the donate box.
The knives are wrapped in dish towels and sealed in a box labeled sharps in her block-letter handwriting.
“These are coming with us,” she says, holding up a set of copper pots that have to be twenty years old. The bottoms are blackened from a decade of gas burners, but they still shine around the edges from loving care.
“You sure?” Leif kneels by the pantry, sorting through spices with a system that involves three different colored sticky notes. “Grady’s kitchen is already stocked.”
“Grady’s pots have the structural integrity of an empty soda can.” Emily sets the copper pots in the keep box. “These have survived three moves, a kitchen fire, and the time Jared tried to cook ramen and boiled the water out of the pan.”
“I was distracted,” I say, folding a dish towel into a square that doesn’t stay square. “You were planting bulbs in the rain, and it was very revealing.”
In the living room, Grady moves through the space with a gentler touch. His hands pause on the bookshelf, on the framed photo of Emily and me standing in front of the Homestead last fall, on the carved wooden bird she made that sits on the windowsill gathering dust.
Each item is considered. Some go in the keep pile. Some get photographed with his phone before they go into the donate box, as if documenting a museum exhibit that’s about to close.
“The guest room furniture stays,” Emily announces on Wednesday night. She stands in the doorway of the room where Grady, Leif, and I have all taken turns at one point or another. “For Jared’s new room on the island.”
“I still haven’t agreed to this,” I pout. “Your bed is more comfortable.”
“And you can still sleep there some nights.” She rises onto her toes to kiss my jutting lower lip. “But you have to share.”
I gather her close. “How about you just get a bigger mattress so we can all sleep together?”
She chuckles. “I don’t think I built any of the bedrooms to support that. Besides, it’s good to have your own space.”
“I hate how reasonable you are.” I kiss my Mark on her neck. “But if it’s what my Alpha demands…”
“It won’t be every night.” And she draws my lips to hers in promise.
By Thursday, the cottage has that hollow, between-lives feeling.
Boxes line the hallway. The walls are bare where photos used to hang.
The kitchen counters are wiped clean, and the sink is empty.
Only the living room set remains intact.
We’re keeping the couch, armchair, side tables, and coffee table for the upstairs family room at the new cabin.
Everything else is either packed, donated, or sitting on the curb waiting for pickup.
I find Emily standing in the empty kitchen, staring out the window at the raised beds she built by hand, the trellises heavy with vines she’s nurtured for years.
I step up behind her to rub her tight shoulders. “We should take clippings, so we can bring a piece of the cottage with us to our new place.”
She sniffles once. “Yeah. We should.”
She turns into my chest until all I can see is the crown of her head. I hold her there for a long moment, my hand stroking her back until her breathing evens out.
Then she pulls away, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist, and joins Leif at the dining table where he’s already sketching layouts for the new shared office space they’ll build in the den upstairs.
I join Grady on the sofa, stealing a handful of the popcorn he made. The last batch to be popped in this microwave.
He leans closer. “Is she okay?”
“She will be.” Boxes crowd every corner of the room. “This place has a lot of memories. Some good, but also too many bad. This move will be good for all of us, but especially for her.”
Grady hums and holds out the popcorn bowl for me to take another handful.
Together, we watch Leif and Emily put their heads together over the paper, Emily’s hand moving in quick, confident strokes, Leif’s finger tracing lines and offering quiet suggestions that Emily either agrees to or crosses out with a firmness that brings a smile to his lips.
“Custom cabinets here,” Emily says, tapping the paper. “Desks on this wall. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on the north side.”
“With a reading nook,” Leif adds, drawing a curve in the corner. “Right by the window for grading papers and pretending to work while actually napping.”
“You’ll have to help me build it,” Emily says as she sketches the nook into the draft. “I’m not your personal carpenter.”
“You’re everyone’s personal carpenter,” I call from the couch. “It’s literally your job.”
She throws a pencil at me. It bounces off my chest and lands in my lap. I don’t give it back.
Friday night, we have nothing left to prepare for the move. The barge is reserved for Sunday, and the moving truck will arrive at the cottage earlier that morning.
We gather around the living room, boxes of Chinese food spread out around the registration documents Dominic completed in record time, his careful handwriting on sticky notes in the margins.
Emily’s folder sits off to the side, the corner of the Petition for Expulsion from Lavender Sky Pack visible beneath the flap. She hasn’t talked about it, and none of us have asked. We’ll be bringing it just to cover our bases, but otherwise, it holds no sway on our future.
I stretch out along the couch with my sock-covered feet in Emily’s lap. Her hand finds my ankle, thumb tracing the bone through my sock, and I melt into the cushions.
Leif pulls a blanket from the back of the armchair and drapes it over his legs as he goes over a clause near the bottom of the third page. “Who do we name as life insurance beneficiaries?”
“Emily can have everything if I die,” I say.
She turns to me. “What about Kyle?”
“All he needs is a boat and his fishing pole.” I wiggle my feet for more attention. “And he already has that.”
“I agree.” Leif writes it down. “Emily can have everything.”
“That works for me,” Grady says from where he’s settled on the other end of the couch, his leg propped on the coffee table. He refilled his wine glass ten minutes ago, and his eyelids keep drooping.
Everyone turns to our Alpha.
She frowns. “I have to pick just one of you?”
Leif reads over the paperwork. “It can be split by percentage.”
“Then thirty-three percent to each of you,” she says.
“That leaves one percent.”
She considers it. “Give that to my old foster home.”
He adds that to the paperwork.
We talk through the rest of the paperwork, going through the particular logistics of four adults combining their lives under the umbrella of a larger pack.
It’s a long process, but none of us complain, because it’s all leading to a destination.
As we near the end of the packet, the conversation winds down. It’s been an exhausting week, and the weekend won’t be much better. Tomorrow we’ll meet Dominic to finalize our joining the Wright Pack, and Sunday we’ll move.
By the end of the weekend, there will be no guest rooms, no Saturday visitors, and no question about where any of us belong.
We’ll finally be a pack.