Epilogue
Eight months later
The house was Jeff’s.
He’d left it to me — the upstate place, off every grid, the one where Amy had taken Noah to ground the night he died.
There’d been a lawyer, a sealed letter, the careful arrangements of a man who’d known for months he was dying and had spent that knowledge the way he’d spent everything at the end, on me, whether I wanted it or not.
You’ll need somewhere with no past on it, the letter said.
I never got to give you anything that wasn’t a betrayal.
Let this be the one thing. Don’t be too proud to take a dead man’s apology. — J.
I’d been too proud to take a living man’s apology for thirty-four years. I took the dead one. It seemed like the least I owed him, and the most.
It’s autumn now, and the hills around the house are going the color Kerra used to talk about, the gold that means the year is turning, and I’m sitting on the porch watching my son try to teach himself to climb a tree he is absolutely not tall enough for, losing the argument with the tree, and refusing to accept the loss, which is so completely Amy’s son that it catches me in the chest the way it always has.
Noah knows what he is now. He’s started to shift — clumsy, delighted, all paws and no coordination, a seven-year-old wolf who tips over a lot and thinks it’s the funniest thing that has ever happened to anyone.
Amy runs with him in the evenings, out past the tree line, and I watch them go, my mate and my son, two wolves disappearing gold into gold, and the thing in my chest that went quiet in a fire thirty-four years ago, runs the whole way with them now, even when my body stays on the porch.
The bond’s awake. All the way. It took the telling — the night in this house when I finally drove her up the whole road and showed her the far side, every mile of it, Kerra, the fire, the child, and the thirty-four years of quiet, and Amy listened the way she listens to everything, directly, without protection.
When I was done, she put her hand flat on my chest the way she had in a holding cell, and felt it answer her, all the way, both directions, for the first time in eleven years.
She’d cried then, which she almost never does.
Eleven years, she’d said. You absolute idiot.
Eleven years and the answer was that you loved me too much to feel it.
And then she’d told me she wasn’t going anywhere, and I’d believed it the way you believe a thing you can feel instead of a thing you’re told.
That’s the thing I’d been most afraid of, my whole life. That the far side of me, shown, would send everyone down off the mattress. Two women told me it wouldn’t. Both of them were right. I just took thirty-four years and one dead friend to believe it.
Amy told me last week.
We were in the kitchen, and she had the particular stillness she gets when she’s about to name something that matters, and her scent had changed — deepened, taken on that low warm note a wolf’s body broadcasts whether she’s ready to or not, the note I’d registered once before in a bedroom in 1988 and filed under nothing because I wasn’t ready to look at it.
I was ready to look at it now.
“I know,” I said, before she could say it. “I can — your scent. I know, Amy.”
She laughed, wet-eyed. “Of course you can. You couldn’t feel a mate bond for eleven years but you can smell this in a week.”
“The bond was a wound. This—“ I put my hand where, in a few months, there’d be a curve, and my voice wasn’t steady, and I let it not be. “This, I’m not going to miss. I missed everything the first time. I’m not going to miss any of it this time.”
She put her hand over mine. “You’re allowed to be afraid of it, you know. Given — everything.”
I was. I am. There is a version of me, in some other branch of the thing Kerra used to describe, who lost a child in a fire and never had the nerve to risk another, who let the grief decide the rest of his life.
I can feel that version, right at the edge of this one, the way I’ve always been able to feel the worse versions of myself standing just out of frame.
I’m not that version. I get to not be that version. That’s the whole improbable gift of the life I didn’t earn and got anyway.
“Consequence,” I said.
Amy tilted her head. “What?”
“Something Kerra used to say. About the multiverse — that every choice branches into a different version of your life, and that the universe doesn’t sort them into right and wrong.
It just has the one category.” I looked out at the gold hills, at the tree my son was still losing to.
“Consequence. Every choice I ever made branched out into some other version of this, and in most of them, I’m a worse man, or a deader one, or a man who never came up those stairs in time.
” I turned back to her. “I didn’t earn this one.
I know exactly what it cost, and who paid it, and how little of it was justice.
But it’s the one I’m in. And I’m going to spend the rest of it being the man both of them thought I could be, instead of the one my father built. ”
Amy was quiet for a moment. Then she leaned her forehead against mine, the way I’d once leaned mine against a dying girl’s in a burning room — except this was the opposite of that, this was a thing beginning, not ending — and she said:
“Then let’s go tell Noah he’s going to be a brother. He’s going to be insufferable about it.”
He was. He is. He’s planning to teach the baby to climb the tree, which neither of them will be tall enough for, and which neither of them will accept as a reason to stop.
So completely Amy’s children.
Some nights, I still get up and stand in the doorway and watch them breathe — Noah in his room, Amy in our bed, the small new curve of the next one rising and falling with her.
The old reflex, checking that the universe hasn’t reconsidered.
It’s gentler now. It’s not fear anymore, or not only fear.
It’s a man making sure he doesn’t sleep through any of the thing he almost didn’t get.
I carry Kerra still. I’ll carry her always — her, and the child who never drew breath, and a man who drove into a guardrail so my son could keep his.
The weight of them is specific and permanent and I’ve stopped wanting it to be otherwise, because the weight is the proof that it was real, that they were real, that I loved them and failed them and lived.
But I don’t carry it alone anymore.
There’s a wolf asleep in the next room who chose me with her eyes open across a dinner table eleven years ago and never once unchose, even through the eleven years I couldn’t answer her.
There’s a boy who tips over when he shifts and thinks it’s hysterical.
There’s a new heartbeat I can hear now, if the house is quiet enough and I let the wolf listen.
And there’s a road, finally, with no part of it I haven’t driven her down.
It is not clean. It is not resolved.
It’s mine. All of it, the far side and the near, the grief and the gold.
And this time, when I say I’m staying — when I say it the whole way down, mate to mate, for as long as we both keep choosing it —
I can feel that she hears me.
That’s everything.