17. Briar
brIAR
Errand day takes me down the mountain, my first trip off it since I drove up, and Rowan Falls in full frost looks like what it is, a wedding town holding its breath for spring.
I have three legitimate stops and one illegitimate purpose.
The legitimate stops are the post office, the pharmacy, and the county records annex.
The illegitimate purpose is that a mediator who’s been lied to politely by an entire pack goes where the impolite versions live, and the impolite versions live down here, on Main Street, between the nesting linens and the bonding whites.
The ceremony outfitter catches me looking at the window display and has the door open before I can decline.
Inside, the shop smells of steam-pressed satin and commerce, and the proprietor, a round warm woman who calls me hon within the first breath, tries to sell me a courting stole before I’ve finished saying the word mediator.
“We do a professional discount,” she says, undeterred. “You county people always come around eventually. It’s the altitude, hon. Gets the biology thinking.”
“The biology and I have a contract.” I finger the edge of a display blanket, wool, nest-grade, priced, and set it down before my hands can vote. “You’ll know the lodge I’m working with, I imagine.”
The warmth stays on her face, and an older look moves in behind it, the practiced sorrow of a town that’s told a story so many times it’s been upholstered.
“You’ll be meaning Halewood. Oh, that was a heartbreak, that whole business.
He stepped out on her, is the long and short.
That beautiful girl, bonded and everything, and Gideon Hale with someone in the city all the while, they say.
Her people came up with lawyers, hon. Took her home inside a week, severed on paper before the town got its coat on.
The pack just, well.” She smooths the stole she never stopped holding.
“Woke up broken, way I heard it. And that lodge used to bond half the state.”
“Inside a week,” I repeat, gently.
“Some say days.” She leans in, confidential, retail-tender. “And her poor family never even let her say goodbye to the town. Whisked her straight off to heal up, and who could blame them.”
Heal up. I buy a spool of ribbon I don’t need, thank her for the local color, and step back out into the cold with the first two entries in today’s evidence log.
Nobody severs a bond on paper inside a week without extraordinary process, and nobody needs to heal up from a husband’s affair.
Heartbreak doesn’t take a convalescence.
Heartbreak takes casseroles, not discharge planning.
The pharmacy’s my second stop, and the pharmacist’s a brisk, kind man who has my refill bagged before I reach the counter, small towns being surveillance states with better manners. He runs my county card, pauses at his screen with the pause I’ve been dreading for months, and taps it twice.
“You’re running a touch ahead of schedule on these, hon.” Everyone in this town says hon. “Not flagging it, just noticing. Cold weather thins the dose for some folks. Altitude does it too.”
“So I hear. The altitude gets the biology thinking.”
He laughs and bags my denial along with the bottle, and I’m turning from the counter when the woman behind me in line says my name.
“Ms. Calloway, isn’t it? Briar.” She’s tall, silver-blond, dressed in quiet money that never raises its voice, and her smile has excellent bones and no pulse.
“The name’s Rean Aldercroft, and my family keeps the lodge on the south ridge.
I expect we’ll be seeing one another at the interim inspection, so I thought I’d introduce myself. ”
Aldercroft. The family that’s wanted the Hale charter since before either of us was alive, per Naomi, and a sitting member of my examination panel, per the file, introducing herself in a pharmacy line.
“I’ll look forward to the formalities, Ms. Aldercroft.”
“Oh, we’re all formality, our family. It’s the Hales who run informal.
” She collects her parcel without breaking eye contact, unhurried, a woman who pre-paid.
“I hope the mountain’s treating you well.
It’s a hard posting, that house. Whatever the town’s told you, they’ll have softened it, they always soften it for the tourists.
Here’s the unsoftened version, one panelist to one professional, no charge.
” She steps in one degree closer, and her voice goes down to the register reserved for gifts that are weapons.
“That girl didn’t walk out of Halewood, Ms. Calloway.
She was carried out. My cousin drove the ambulance.
The pack alpha stood in the drive and watched them load her, and he didn’t ride along.
Whatever else gets certified up that mountain this winter, do remember you’re vouching for it with your license. ”
She wishes me a lovely errand day, hon-free, and leaves a hole in the pharmacy where the temperature used to be.
I sit in my car in the records annex lot a long while before I go in, watching frost creep up the windshield, holding the two versions of the same woman side by side.
The town’s version is a romance novel with the ending torn out.
Betrayal, lawyers, extraction, a severance stamped in days, a girl whisked away to heal from a broken heart.
It’s a good story, and it’s bullshit. It has a villain with a beautiful face and a lodge for a castle, and it explains everything except every single mechanical fact of how bonds actually end.
Bonds don’t sever on betrayal. If infidelity broke bonds, my profession would be a hospice.
Bonds sever three ways, by consent with counter-signatures and a waiting period, by court order with a hearing that leaves a paper trail, or by medical certification, expedited, sealed, when the bond itself is killing somebody.
And even that last route needs the patient’s own name on the line, because the law won’t tear a bond off a competent omega who keeps choosing it, not to save her life, not for anything.
It’s a mercy in the statute books, and it has killed more than one client of mine, the ones who kept signing nothing while the numbers went red, because a bond you’re dying inside is still a bond you get to keep.
The abstract in my county file is stamped uncontested, expedited.
No contest marks, no hearing record. A family that stormed a mountain with lawyers would have left contest marks, and there are none.
Nobody fought. The town’s story was dressed after the fact.
And the Aldercroft version, delivered with malice aforethought by a woman with skin in my hearing, contains the one detail malice didn’t need to invent, an ambulance with a cousin at the wheel, the truthful specific liars never bother to add.
Carried squares with Soren’s ward-pacing vocabulary, with a standing bill called quarterly business, with a pack that keeps a hospital in its story and has hidden it from an entire town.
Even her cruelest brushstroke, the pack alpha watching from the drive, not riding along, sits wrong in exactly the spot that interests me.
Alphas ride with a bonded omega or they tear the doors off trying.
Unless someone had a reason to stand still that was stronger than a bond, and I have never encountered anything that qualifies.
Nobody wakes up severed. Somebody signs, somebody schedules, somebody chooses expedited. The question this file keeps declining to answer is who held the pen first, and why a town in love with the story of a villain has never asked to see the paperwork.
I go into the annex and request the public decree file, and the clerk tells me the folder’s checked out for digitization and has been, hon, for a while now.
“It’s the only complete copy in the county,” she adds, helpful.
“Expedited severances only ever ran in the bulletins as a summary. The decree itself has sat in our stacks since it was stamped.” The digitization program, a small placard on the counter informs me, is generously sponsored by the Rowan Falls Historical Society, whose chairwoman, the same placard notes, is an Aldercroft.
Of course it fucking is. On the drive back up the mountain, the first true snow of the season starts, small flakes, in no hurry.
The pharmacist’s little observation rides shotgun all the way, a touch ahead of schedule, and the rowans hold their berries out on both sides of the road all the way to the lodge.
Gideon’s in the lot when I pull in, hood up, ostensibly checking the plow blade, which does not need checking, at the exact hour of the season a car might come up the pass through first snow.
He watches me park with the studied disinterest of a man conducting a safety audit, and it’s while he’s pretending to inspect the plow that I finally look, actually look, at my own car.
The tires are new. Deep-lugged winter tread, all four corners, and I have never in my life bought a winter tire.
Somewhere behind me the plow blade gets a percussive, wholly unnecessary adjustment, and I stand in the falling snow doing the counting I apparently do now instead of feelings.
Someone jacked up my sedan corner by corner and never said a word, then went on nodding at me across dining rooms.
“Your tread was gone,” Gideon says from under his hood, to the plow, in passing, before I’ve asked a single question. “The pass doesn’t forgive. Dinner’s at the usual.”
He leaves before I can answer, and it’s becoming his signature move, for a man who claims he wants nothing to do with me.
“Un-fucking-believable,” I tell the tires, all of them, and they say nothing, being in on it.
The snow keeps accumulating, and I stand there next to four brand-new reasons to survive the winter, holding my little bag of gossip and suppressants, confused to a degree I have no form for.