Chapter 1 #2
There is a ring in the wood near the left edge — a faint, slightly darker ring, the size of a coffee mug bottom — that Ronan left the morning of our second anniversary.
He had put a hot mug down on the bare wood and I had yelled at him and he had laughed and kissed me with the mug-warm side of his mouth and said, now it's ours forever.
I run my thumb over the ring. It is still there. It is still ours.
I find a piece of paper in the drawer where we used to keep the bills. It is yellowed, but it is paper. I find a pen in the same drawer. The pen still works.
Ronan, I write.
I am writing this to you because I am about to walk across the compound to your brother's office and ask him to put his hands on our son and pull our son's wolf the rest of the way out, and if I do not say something to you first I am going to break apart on his porch and I cannot afford to be in pieces tonight.
Callum is alive. Callum is your face on a seventeen-year-old body.
Callum has your jaw and your mouth and your stubborn ungovernable hair and a laugh that sounds like the laugh you used to have when you thought no one was listening.
He does not know about you. He knows you died before he was born.
He knows your name. He does not know the rest.
I never told him.
I never told anyone.
I want you to know — wherever you are, if you are anywhere at all — that I did not leave Bone Hollow because I hated your brother.
I left because every wall in that cabin had your shadow in it and I could not breathe.
I left because I was twenty-one and pregnant and I did not know how to be a widow in a place where the man who killed my husband walked past my window every morning.
I left because if I had stayed, I would have either forgiven Kael or destroyed him, and I was not ready to do either one.
I am coming back now. I am bringing your son. I am putting him in your brother's hands.
I do not know what is going to happen after that.
I love you. I have always loved you. The part of me that was yours has been a folded flag in a drawer for seventeen years and I am taking it out now, in front of you, and I am laying it on the table.
Forgive me for what I am about to do, if it needs forgiving.
And if you can — wherever you are — forgive him.
I fold the paper.
I do not put it in an envelope. I do not seal it.
I tuck it into the drawer where I found it, and I close the drawer, and I stand up.
My hands are shaking. My hands are not going to stop shaking.
I let them shake. I put on my coat. I look at my son one more time — his ruined hand on the table, his chest rising and falling, the pulse at his throat where Jo's fingers were — and I go.
The clubhouse is across the compound. I walk it.
The path is the same path I used to walk when I brought Ronan his lunch on the days he was at the bench.
The gravel is the same gravel. The pine needles smell the same way they always smelled.
My boots make the same sound and my breath comes out in the same white cloud and the moon is exactly where the moon was the last night I walked this path, the night before everything went wrong.
The clubhouse door is heavy. I push it. The common room is quiet — most of the brothers are at the bar in the back or out on a run — and the men who are in the room look up and their faces go through a sequence of expressions I do not have time to catalog.
Someone makes a sound. Someone else says my name like a curse.
Della is suddenly there, beside me, and she takes my elbow and walks me through the common room like an escort and the men part for her the way men part for Della and we go down the back hall to the office at the end.
The collector's office.
The door is closed.
It is always closed.
I knock.
There is a beat. Long enough that I think — for one absurd second — that he has gone for the night, that he is not there, that I am going to have to walk back to the cabin and tell Jo to send for Conrad, and I will not have to see Kael's face.
Then the door opens.
He looks at me.
I see it. I see the moment. I see the wall in his face crack for one half of one second and behind it I see — shock, longing, something that might be grief if grief could survive seventeen years of being denied.
I see the man inside the man. I see the boy I used to know, the boy Ronan was building a brotherhood with, the boy who used to come over for dinner on Tuesdays and could not for the life of him cook an egg.
Then the wall comes back up.
His face goes flat.
His eyes go dark.
"Willa," he says.
It is the first time he has said my name in seventeen years and it lands somewhere under my sternum and stays there.
"I need your help," I say. "Can I come in?"
He steps back. He holds the door. I walk past him. I do not touch him. I sit down across the desk from his chair. He closes the door behind me and stands behind it for a beat, with his back to me, and I do not turn around to look at him. I let him have that second. He needs it.
When he comes around the desk and sits down, he is composed.
The wall is up and sealed. He folds his hands on the desk in front of him.
His knuckles are scarred. His nose is the same broken nose.
His hair is shorter than it used to be and silver at the temples and the rest of it the iron grey of a man who has stopped pretending he is young.
He looks at me. He waits.
"I have a son," I say.
He does not blink.
"His name is Callum. He is seventeen. He's Ronan's."
His hands, on the desk, do not move. I watch them. I cannot watch his face.
"He's shifting. He started this morning.
He's stuck in a half-shift and Jo says he doesn't have a pack anchor and he needs a blood alpha to walk him through it and you're the closest blood he has.
I need you to do it. I am not asking you to be anything to him after.
I am not asking for anything for myself.
I am asking you to put your hands on my son and bring him through this shift and keep him alive. "
I look up.
His face has not moved. But his eyes — his eyes have gone somewhere I cannot follow.
They are looking at me and they are not looking at me.
They are looking at a road outside the compound seventeen years ago and they are looking at his brother and they are looking at the boy he just learned exists, and behind the wall, behind the wall, the man is on his knees.
He breathes in. He breathes out.
He says: "Where is he."
"The cabin."
He stands up.
He reaches for his coat. His hands are steady. The wall is back, locked, sealed. He puts on his coat. He pulls open the door for me. He says, in a voice that is professional and gentle and absolutely empty: "After you."
I stand up. I walk past him. He follows me out, and down the hall, and across the common room — the men do not say anything this time, not one word, because they have seen Kael Moran's face and they know better — and out the heavy clubhouse door and into the cold, and the moon is still where it was, and my son is still where I left him, and somewhere on a mountainside above us my husband is in the ground, and the four of us — me, Kael, Callum, Ronan — are about to be in the same cabin for the first time in seventeen years, and one of us is going to have to put his hand on a boy who looks exactly like the brother he killed and tell that boy he is safe.
I walk faster.
Kael walks behind me.
He does not say a word.
Neither do I.