3. Josie
Josie
The Huckleberry Hollow fire station has two trucks, one flagpole, and a row of bay doors that stand open in any weather above freezing, which is how I'll know Finn's in there before I'm halfway down the block.
It is also a block and a half from the preschool, straight down Main, which means the walk to ruin Finn Morrow's afternoon takes four minutes and passes directly in front of Dottie's Diner at the exact hour Pete refreshes his afternoon coffee.
I see him see me through the glass. I watch the calculation happen, the knuckles rising toward the window, and I do the only thing a woman in my position can do. I take out my phone, press it to my ear, and have an animated conversation with nobody.
“Uh-huh,” I tell the dial tone, nodding seriously. “No, absolutely. Tuesday at the earliest.”
Pete's knuckles hover. Lower. He settles back into his booth with the patience of a man who knows the fish will come back around eventually, and Dottie, refilling his cup, gives me a look through the window that says she saw the whole performance.
Two doors from the station, I put the phone away and rehearse the pitch one more time. I've got it polished. Calm. Reasonable. The pitch of a woman in complete control of her circumstances. Warm him up, then spring the favor. Do not apologize first. Do not turn red.
Finn Morrow is halfway under the engine on one of those little rolling boards, just boots and forearms and the occasional clank. I have not said one single word when the clanking stops.
“No,” says the underside of the truck.
“You don't know what I'm going to say.”
“You walked here from the school in the middle of the day.” He rolls out.
Sits up. There's a smear of grease down one forearm, right over the burn scar he pretends he doesn't have, and he looks at me the way he looks at a hairline crack in a load-bearing wall.
“Your hands are doing the thing they do when you want something.
And you smell like a bake sale that's on fire.”
I put my hands behind my back. Which, fine. Is an admission.
This is the problem with alphas as a category. You can dress your panic up in all the calm you want, and your own scent will stand behind you waving a sign. Brown sugar and burnt edges. A bake sale on fire is honestly generous.
“I need a favor,” I say.
“You have a favor. One. Banked.” His eyes narrow to gray-green slits. “Which you've been sitting on for two months like a vulture.”
“A dragon, actually, was the image I was going for.”
“What do you want, Josie.”
And here's where the polished pitch was supposed to go. The gentle on-ramp. The context. What comes out instead, at speed, is…
“I told my mother I have a pack and the family reunion is in a month and I need three alphas to come with me and pretend to be my pack and you're one of them.”
Silence.
Somewhere in the back of the station, a radio murmurs about a cattle gate on Route 9.
Finn looks at me for a long moment. A muscle in his jaw ticks once. Then he lies back down on the little board and rolls under the truck.
“Finn.”
Clank.
“Finn.”
“I'm declaring the favor void,” the truck says. “On the grounds of insanity.”
“That's not how favors work.”
“New policy. Started today.”
I crouch down so I'm talking to his boots, which feels about right for where this negotiation is.
“It's one weekend. One. You stand in a backyard, you eat my mother's potato salad, you glower at people, which is free, you already do it, and you let me tell everyone you're mine. Then it's over and we never speak of it again. Which I know for a fact is your favorite way for things to be.”
The clanking stops. For a second I think I've got him.
“Say the last part back to yourself,” he says. “Slowly.”
“Which part?”
“The part where I let you tell your entire family I'm yours.”
He rolls out again, and this time he stands, wiping his hands on a rag with more force than the rag deserves.
He's a foot taller than me and built like the truck he just crawled out from under, and the woodsmoke and clove coming off him has an edge on it now, something hotter underneath, and I am going to need to have a word with my body about that later.
“Your mother. Your whole family. A backyard full of people who've known you since you were born, and they're supposed to buy that you're mine.” He shakes his head. “We don't even like each other, Porter. And you can't lie worth a damn. Your ears are already red and you haven't even started.”
“My ears are always red. It's a condition.”
“It's not a condition.” He crosses his arms, which everyone in this town knows is Finn for I am winning this conversation, but his voice drops when he says the next part, low enough that it's just for me. “And your scent could be read from space.”
For a second neither of us says anything, and the bay is very warm for a building full of concrete.
“It's a bad plan, Porter,” he says, normal volume again, like the last ten seconds didn't happen. “Worst one I've heard since Hudson's twin.”
“Funny you should mention Hudson.”
The arms come down. “No.”
“He's candidate two.”
“Then you don't need me. You've got a golden retriever who can talk. Add Logan Walker, he'd walk into a lake if you asked him nice, and there's your pack.”
“Why would he walk into a lake?”
Finn looks at me for a second, something almost like pity crossing his face, and then decides not to spend the energy. “Forget it.”
I shake it off. “I'm going to ask Logan. He's on the list.” I say it a little firmer than I mean to. “But I need three, and packs come in threes, Finn, that's not me being greedy, it's just how it works.”
“Take Carl Tubbs. Solves your whole problem.”
“No, it does not.”
“Why not? Man's banned from the festival pie contest, which means he's wide open every festival from here on out. Nothing but time on his hands.”
“I'm not bringing the pie criminal to meet my mother. Focus.”
He drags a hand down his face, leaving a faint streak of grease along his jaw, and I watch the math happen behind his eyes.
The favor. The closet.
The Spring Fling, two months ago. His mother trotted out a lovely visiting omega, who was perfectly nice, which somehow made it worse, and a large grown firefighter hid from his own mother in my preschool's craft closet, between the pipe cleaners and the seasonal felt.
The only reason the whole town doesn't know is that I stood in that doorway and lied to Cynthia Morrow's face.
Badly. My voice went up two octaves. I claimed Finn was helping me assemble a sensory table. Cynthia looked at me with her head tilted for what felt like a year and a half of my life, and then chose to believe it, because the alternative was unbearable for everyone.
He knows I know he's thinking about it. I know he knows I know. This is the entire texture of our friendship, if that's what this is. Two months of him hoping I forgot, and me polishing the memory like a coin.
“You said,” I remind him sweetly, “and I quote, 'I owe you one, Porter. Anything. Name it.'“
“I was under duress.”
“You were under a shelf of googly eyes.”
“Anything reasonable. There's an implied reasonable. It's implied in all favors. That's contract law.”
“You're a fireman.”
“Firefighter.”
“You're a firefighter who's about to welch on a debt to a preschool teacher. They'll take your calendar month away.”
And there, for one quarter of one second, something happens at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. Finn Morrow doesn't hand those out on a Tuesday. But the ghost of where one would go, and the woodsmoke mellows, just barely, just enough that I notice the noticing.
Then he kills it.
“No,” he says. Quietly this time, which is worse than the loud one. “Find someone else, Josie. I'm not the guy you bring home to a mother. Ask anyone. Ask mine.”
He picks the wrench back up and doesn't turn around. Conversation over. The radio murmurs. The flag outside snaps once in the wind.
I should let it go. A graceful woman would let it go.
“A month,” I say to his shoulder blades. “The reunion's on a Saturday, end of the month. I'll have the other two by the end of the week, and the offer stays open till then. And Finn?”
He doesn't turn around. But the wrench stops moving.
“I didn't pick you for the favor. The favor's just how I'm paying for you. I picked you because when the fire truck goes past my window, twelve kids lose their minds, and you wave back every single time, and you think nobody sees you do it.”
I walk out through the bay doors into the afternoon. I make it almost the whole block before I let myself look back. The station sits there in the sun, doors open, flag snapping. Faintly, from inside, metal on metal. A pause. Then again, harder than the truck deserves.
He let me finish. That's the part I keep turning over. The man hangs up on telemarketers mid-word, and he let me say the whole insane thing start to end before he said no.
That's not nothing. I don't know what it is, but it's not nothing.
I'm still standing there turning it over when my phone buzzes, and this time it doesn't stop.
It's the family group chat. The family group chat is named “Porter Party Planning ” and has more members than I have relatives I can name, and exactly one administrator, and the administrator has made an announcement.
Mom: WONDERFUL NEWS EVERYONE!! Josie is bringing her PACK to the reunion!!!
Mom: Three alphas!!
Mom: She's kept them a secret because she wanted to be SURE, which I think shows real maturity!!
I stop walking. A man watering his lawn says afternoon and I say it back on autopilot, staring at my phone while it buzzes itself to death in my hand.
Aunt Deb: A PACK!!! Our Josie!!!
Aunt Deb: I'm at the dentist and I'm crying. The hygienist is concerned.
Uncle Ray: Do they hunt
Aunt Deb: RAY.
Uncle Ray: It's a normal question
I put the phone in my pocket, where it keeps buzzing.
Back at the school, Lily takes one look at my face and pours the last of the morning's coffee into my cup without a word.
“He said no,” I tell her.
“To the favor?”
“To all of it. Went back under the truck.”
My phone buzzes in my pocket. Then again. Lily's eyes drop to it.
“Group chat?” Lily says.
“The whole family's in it. Uncle Ray wants to know if they hunt.”
“Then we work fast.” She hands me my bag for the second time today. “Hudson tomorrow morning, Logan tomorrow afternoon. And Finn comes around.”
“Finn is not coming around. Finn went back under a truck.”
“He let you finish, didn't he? The whole pitch? Josie, the man ends conversations for a living. That's a yes with a wind-up.” She points me at the door. “But fine. We plan around him. Go home. Sleep. Tomorrow you recruit a golden retriever.”
Home is a little blue house four streets off Main with a porch swing I never sit on, and by eight o'clock I'm on the couch with cold pasta, watching the group chat invent details about my pack in real time.
Aunt Deb thinks one of them is a doctor.
Nobody told her that. The lie is out there growing limbs without me.
There's exactly one person in this family I've never managed to lie to, mostly because I've never tried. I pull up our thread and type before I can think better of it.
Me: So hypothetically
Me: If someone told their entire family they had a pack
Me: When they definitely do not have a pack
Me: And now said family expects to meet this pack at the reunion
Me: How screwed would that someone be?
The phone rings four seconds later.
“Josie.” Cara's voice has the particular calm of a romance author who has plotted this exact disaster professionally. “What did you do?”
“Don't tell my mom.”
“Oh, this is bad.” A rustle. A door closing. The sound of my cousin settling in for the whole thing. “Start at the beginning and do not skip the part where you panicked.”
So I tell her, all of it, and she doesn't interrupt once, which is how I know she's enjoying herself. Somewhere in the background one of her alphas asks if she wants tea, and she shushes him like he's talking during a movie.
“Okay,” she says when I finish. “First, as your cousin, I love you and this is a catastrophe. Second, as a professional, the structure's actually solid. Fake pack, ticking clock, meddling mother. I'd buy it in paperback.”
“Cara.”
“Third.” Her voice gentles, and that's worse than the teasing.
“Jos, a real pack doesn't perform. It's a hundred little things nobody thinks about.
Who you lean on when your feet hurt. Who you look at first when something's funny.
You can't fake that cold, and Mom's been watching the real thing her whole life.”
It's almost word for word what Lily told me three hours ago, in a fish tank's worth of light, and the two of them landing in the exact same place from forty minutes apart is its own kind of verdict.
“You're the second person to tell me that today,” I say.
“Then the second person is also right. Whoever you find, you'd better rehearse.”
“I have a plan.”
“You have a month and a list, knowing you.” A pause. “I'm keeping your secret. Obviously. But I want it on record that I'm doing it because watching this happen in person is going to be better than anything I could write.”
“You're carrying my future godchild. Be nice to me.”
“I'm being so nice to you. Goodnight, Josie. Go get your pack.”
She hangs up. The group chat scrolls on without me, the whole family planning a welcome for three alphas who don't know they exist yet.
Tomorrow morning. The golden retriever.
I fall asleep on the couch rehearsing the pitch.