Chapter 3 Come Home
The phone rings twice before I glance at the screen.
Moira.
I set it face-down on the table. Through the window, the lake has gone from grey to the pale silver it gets mid-morning, when the cloud cover thins without actually breaking. I watch it.
The phone goes quiet.
Then it starts again.
I pick up.
"Rowan!" The voice comes warm and immediate, the way you'd answer for someone you'd spoken to last week. "I've been trying to reach you — are you keeping busy? You sound well."
"Mm." I don't offer more. She doesn't need it.
She fills the silence herself, round and easy, not a single beat dropping. She asks about my sleep. She mentions the weather somewhere. She says Isabella has been asking after me, that I never reach out, that Isabella misses me, you know how she is —
"How are you liking Switzerland?" she asks. "I heard it gets cold early there."
I watch the water outside. "I moved. Last year. I'm in New Zealand now."
"Oh, you know what—" A small, fond laugh. "My memory. You'll have to forgive me. Isabella was just saying the other day, she can never keep track of where you've gone off to."
Warm. Natural. The wrong city name lands and she lifts right over it, no pause, no seam.
"Anyway." Her tone settles, easy as putting down a cup.
"I wanted to catch up, but I also — there's a situation at home. Business. Your father thinks an alliance is the right move, finding another pack with enough standing to shore things up. He's been looking at a few options." A breath, light and reassuring. "The candidates are very strong."
An alliance. The polite word for it.
I wait.
"Oh?" I say. "What are they like?"
A beat. Not long. Half a second, maybe less, the kind of pause that would read as nothing if you weren't listening for it.
"The details are still being worked out," she says, smooth again. "We'd rather go through everything properly when you're home."
So there's no one good yet. I say nothing.
"But Rowan." Her voice softens. The long-suffering warmth of someone delivering advice they've given many times.
"You can't be too selective. Isabella is a full year younger than you and she's been married two years now. Men like Callum — they don't come along often. You know that better than anyone."
There it is.
I know exactly what this is. I learned it young, before I had words for it: make her feel behind, make her feel lucky to be considered. If she says no, she's the problem.
I'm not ten years old. And I'm not who I was two years ago.
"You're right," I say. My voice comes out level, conversational, the way you'd discuss the price of coffee. "You know I was with Cal a long time. I know what that standard looks like. I can't go backwards from that — you understand."
I let it sit, then add, "You wouldn't ask me to sacrifice my happiness for the pack's sake. I'm his daughter too, aren't I?"
The line is quiet for one full second.
My father's voice cuts in, low and direct, with no preamble. "Nightridge replied. They've agreed to preliminary discussions."
I go still.
"The pack is solid financially. Lachlan Voss is capable. What exactly is your objection? Come home."
On the other end, I hear Moira, faint. "They replied?"
She doesn't cover it. The surprise is real. Half a breath, a fraction of an octave up. And that tells me something.
Nightridge doesn't reply. A pack twice the size of Silverpine, maybe three times, the kind of name that comes up when someone's explaining why they didn't bother asking, and they replied.
I don't say anything. There's nothing useful to say yet.
I hold the phone against my palm and think about the name.
Lachlan. I knew him the way you know someone who never looked at you — adjacent, at university, present in the same rooms without being in them.
He stood at the edges of group photos. When Isabella tried talking to him once, he kept his eyes somewhere past her shoulder.
The only time he'd engaged at all was with Cal, in combat training, the two of them working through each other from one end of the field to the other without either one dropping pace.
He spoke maybe four words to me in four years.
Why would someone like that say yes to this?
"Come home tomorrow." My father's voice. "We'll discuss in person."
The call ends.
I sit with the phone in my hand and the lake outside doing its flat, unhurried thing.
I open my photos. Scroll back two years, past the blank run of nothing, into a cluster of faces I haven't looked at in a long time.
Everyone laughing at something. Cups raised. Someone making a face at the camera. I swipe slowly, and the faces pass under my thumb one by one.
I'm not interested in protecting a pack that stopped protecting me the day I stood at a window and watched my own wedding.
But my mother's shares — the piece of Silverpine that belonged to her, that she left to me before she left anything else — that's a different question.
That's mine. It was always mine. I just haven't gone to collect it.
I'll go back. Find the right person to align with, stabilize the pack long enough to matter, take what belongs to me, pay whatever that costs, and leave.
I stop scrolling.
At the edge of the last group shot, he's there. Standing at the very end of the line, turned slightly away, not looking at the lens. Not smiling. Everyone else crowded together and him with a foot of space on either side, present only technically.
I don't know what he'd want out of an arrangement like that. But if it were him, things would be simpler.
I close the photos. Open the travel app. Type the destination.
The ticket comes through in under a minute.
I stand and pull the wardrobe open. Start taking things off hangers.