11. An Inventory of Healing
Chapter eleven
An Inventory of Healing
Five weeks in. I realized something.
I'd been leaving my apartment door unlocked when I was home. Not just occasionally, not every day, but more and more often this past week or so. It had started small—forgetting to throw the deadbolt when I came in with groceries, leaving the chain off while I worked on the porch. But tonight I’d realized I hadn’t even glanced at the lock before climbing into bed.
For a woman who had checked every entry point twice a night for two years straight, that was seismic.
I thought about this for a while, sitting on my bed with my morning coffee. Decided it was because the neighborhood was safe, the building was secure, there was nothing to worry about.
But I knew, I knew, that it wasn't only that.
It was them. The Voss brothers. Their presence in the house below, the knowledge that they were there, that they were watching out. Some protective instinct I didn't understand had convinced my lizard brain that I was safe here. That no one would hurt me while they were near.
I should have been alarmed by this. I was the woman who checked locks twice, who slept with pepper spray on her nightstand, who had spent two years being vigilant because the alternative was being vulnerable.
Instead, I felt... peaceful.
I made myself take stock. A habit from therapy: the inventory of small changes, the evidence of healing that didn’t feel like healing until you added it all up.
In the past five weeks, I had: stopped sleeping with my phone under my pillow, started leaving curtains open at night, stopped flinching when car doors slammed in the driveway, begun humming while I worked; something I hadn’t done since before Marcus.
The unlocked door was just the latest item on a list I hadn’t meant to make.
I finished my coffee and went to the window.
The magnolia tree was catching the morning light; that early Southern sun that turned everything golden and soft-edged.
Jasper was crossing the yard toward his truck, moving with that elegant grace all three of them had.
He looked up, as if he’d felt me watching, and lifted a hand in a wave.
I waved back.
That was another thing. The automatic responses.
The way my body had started reacting to them without consulting my brain first. I’d catch myself smiling when I heard Eli’s voice through the floor, or turning toward the window when Callum’s truck rumbled up the drive.
My nervous system had made decisions my conscious mind hadn’t authorized.
I should have found this concerning. The last time I’d let someone past my defenses—
But that was different. Marcus had dismantled my walls brick by brick, so slowly I didn’t notice until I was exposed.
This felt more like the walls had simply...
decided to open a door. On their own terms. To let in light and air…
and the sound of three brothers who had never once made me feel small.
***
At the studio, Lila was in the middle of a minor crisis involving a client who wanted their logo to be “more dynamic but also calmer, you know?”
“I do not know,” she said, spinning her chair to face me. “I have never known. I will never know. Is this what design school prepared us for?”
“Make it blue,” I said. “Blue is both dynamic and calming. It’s science.”
“It’s already blue.”
“Bluer.”
She threw a stress ball at me. I caught it, which felt like a small victory.
We worked in comfortable silence for a while.
The studio had become familiar over the past month; the way the light moved across the floor in the afternoon, the specific creak of Lila’s chair when she leaned back to think, the coffee maker that sounded like it was dying but produced surprisingly decent espresso.
“You seem different,” Lila said eventually.
I looked up from my screen. “Different how?”
“Less like you’re waiting for something bad to happen.” She said it casually, but her eyes were careful. “When you first got here, you had this... I don’t know. Vigilant look. Like you were always checking the exits.”
I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t realized it was visible.
“You don’t have to tell me what you were running from,” she continued, turning back to her computer. “But I’m glad you’re not running anymore.”
“Me too,” I said. And meant it.
***
Walking home that evening, I found myself again listing the things I couldn’t explain about the Voss family.
The way they always seemed to know when someone was approaching.
Not just a glance at a car coming up the drive; I’d seen Callum turn toward the road a full thirty seconds before headlights appeared.
The way they communicated without speaking, exchanging looks that carried entire conversations.
The odd hours they kept, slipping out into the preserve after dark and returning with the dawn.
The way the property felt different from anywhere else I’d been. Safer, somehow. Enclosed. Like the boundaries of the estate were more than just property lines.
I’d filed these observations under “eccentric old money family” and moved on. The file was getting thick, and some of the observations didn’t fit the folder.
Like the way animals avoided the yard. I’d seen deer at the edge of the preserve, squirrels in the trees just beyond the fence line, but never on the actual property. As if there was an invisible boundary they wouldn’t cross.
Like the howling I sometimes heard at night, it was too coordinated to be random wildlife. Too close to be coming from anywhere but the preserve itself.
Like the way Rowena looked at me sometimes, not suspicious, but knowing. As if she could see something about me that I couldn’t see myself.
I told myself there were rational explanations for all of it. There probably were. But I couldn’t quite convince myself to look for them.
Part of me didn’t want to.
I ran into Callum on the stairs.
He was coming up as I was going down, and we met in the middle, close enough that I could see the individual flecks of gold in his dark eyes. Close enough that the smell of wood smoke and something earthier wrapped around me, primal.
"Morning," he said.
"Morning."
Neither of us moved.
The morning light caught the side of his face, and I found myself noticing things I’d been pretending not to notice: the hard line of his jaw, the way his shoulders filled out his shirt, the visible restraint in every line of his body.
He held himself like a man keeping something leashed.
Like he was always a half-second away from doing something he’d decided not to do.
"You look different," he said finally.
"Different how?"
"Rested." His eyes searched my face. "Settled."
"I left my door unlocked last night," I heard myself say. "I don't do that. I never do that."
Something shifted in his expression. A crack in that careful control.
"That’s good, you feel safe here," he said. It wasn't a question.
"I do. I don't know why. I barely know any of you. I have no reason to—"
"You have every reason." His voice was low, rough. "You feel safe because you are safe. Because—"
He stopped. His jaw clenched.
"Because what?"
For a long moment, I thought he wouldn't answer. Then, slowly: "Because you belong here. Whether you know it or not. This is where you're supposed to be."
He moved past me, close enough that his shoulder brushed mine, and disappeared up the stairs to his room.
I stood there for a long time, trying to understand what had just happened.
***
I found Eli in the kitchen an hour later, making coffee with the careful precision he brought to everything. He looked up when I came in, those wire-rimmed glasses catching the light.
“You look unsettled,” he observed.
“I had a conversation with Callum.”
Something flickered in his expression, too quick to read. “Callum tends to say more than he means to. And less.”
“That’s— yes. That’s exactly what happened.”
He poured a second cup of coffee and handed it to me without being asked. My order, exactly right.
“Give him time,” he said. “He’ll make more sense, eventually.”
“Will he?”
He smiled, small, private, like he was amused by a joke I hadn’t heard yet.
***
That night, I sat on my porch with a glass of wine and watched the preserve.
The magnolia tree was a dark shape against the deeper dark of the sky.
Somewhere in the distance, something howled, that coordinated, deliberate sound I’d grown used to hearing.
I was starting to think it was wild dogs.
I should have found it unsettling. Instead, it felt like a lullaby.
Like being told the perimeter was secure.
I thought about what Callum had said. You belong here.
It should have sounded presumptuous. Possessive, even, the kind of thing Marcus might have said in a different context, with a different meaning.
But from Callum, it hadn’t felt like a claim.
It had felt like a statement of fact. Like he was telling me something true about the nature of the universe, and he was surprised I didn’t already know it.
I didn’t know what to do with that.
Below, through the floor of my apartment, I could hear the muffled sounds of the house: Jasper’s laugh, Eli’s quieter voice responding, the clink of dishes being washed. Normal domestic sounds. Family sounds. The kind of background noise I’d stopped expecting to be part of.
I pulled out my phone and texted Tara.
Me: Something weird happened today.
Tara: Define weird. Weird-cute or weird-run?
Me: I don’t know. Both? Neither?
Tara: That’s not ominous at all. Call me tomorrow.
I put the phone down and looked at the preserve again. A shadow moved at the edge of the treeline, large, low to the ground, moving with the fluid grace of something at home in the dark. I watched it disappear into the woods without feeling any particular alarm.
I didn’t check the locks before bed.
I slept better than I had in years.
But sometime in the night, I woke to a sound I couldn't place. Not the howling. Not the wind. Something closer. Something inside.
I lay perfectly still, the way Marcus had taught me to lie still, and listened.
Breathing. Soft and steady. Coming from somewhere near my window.
My heart seized. My hand crept toward the nightstand, toward the pepper spray I still kept there even though I'd stopped sleeping with my phone under my pillow.
Then the breathing moved. Shifted. And I realized it was coming from outside the window, not inside. Something was on my porch. Something large enough that I could hear it breathing through the glass.
I should have been terrified. I should have called out, should have grabbed my phone, should have done any of the things a rational person would do when they woke to find something breathing outside their bedroom window.
Instead, I got up and walked to the glass.
The shape on my porch was massive. Dark fur, silver-tipped in the moonlight. Eyes that caught the light and reflected it back, golden and steady.
A wolf. There was a wolf on my porch.
It watched me watching it. Then, slowly, deliberately, it lowered its head and pressed its nose against the glass, right where my hand was resting on the other side.
I felt the warmth of its breath through the window. Felt something else too, something that hummed in my chest like recognition, like homecoming, like a lock finally finding its key.
The wolf held my gaze for one long moment. Then it turned and disappeared into the night, moving toward the preserve with that fluid grace I was learning to recognize.