Chapter 4 #2
"And now she's on my porch every night and her son is in the woods with me every morning and I sit across from her at supper and I — I don't know what I am, Priest. I'm not a man who falls.
I'm not built for it. I'm the man who collects.
I'm the man with the broken nose and the closed door.
I'm not built to — I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to do this at all."
"You're doing it."
"I'm doing it badly."
"You're doing it. That's not the same as doing it badly."
I put my elbows on the table. I press my palms into my eyes. The wolf inside me is awake, listening. He has not gone back to the mountainside. He has come into the chapel with me, which is new, which is something he has not done in a long time.
I say, "I don't know what to do."
Priest is quiet for a long minute.
He says, "Do you think Ronan would want her alone for the rest of her life?"
I lift my head.
"What?"
"Do you think your brother — your brother as you knew him — would want his wife to spend the rest of her life alone in a fishing town in Maine, with no man and no pack and no comfort. Do you think the man you grew up with would want that for her."
"He'd want her happy."
"With another man."
"He'd —" I stop. I make myself think about it.
I make myself think about Ronan, my actual brother, the way he actually was, not the perfect martyr I have built him into over seventeen years.
Ronan, who teased Willa relentlessly and adored her absolutely and once, when he was drunk, said to me — if I die before her, Kael, you make sure she doesn't go cold.
You make sure somebody warms up her side of the bed. I don't want her cold.
I had forgotten he said that. I had forgotten the whole conversation. It comes up out of me now like a coin out of a creek bed and I almost have to laugh.
"He'd want her warm," I say.
"Yes."
"He just — he didn't mean me."
"Didn't he."
"Priest. I killed him."
"You did."
"He would want me dead. Just for thinking about it."
Priest is quiet.
Then he says, "Ronan betrayed his pack and got himself killed. He lost the right to dictate who loves his wife."
The sentence hits me like a flat hand to the chest. I stare at him. He stares back. He does not flinch. He has said it the way he says everything — quietly, plainly, with the full weight of a thing that has been thought out and worked through and not said until exactly this moment.
"You don't believe that," I say.
"I believe it absolutely."
"He didn't — he wasn't a bad man."
"He wasn't. He was a man who made a bad choice and the bad choice was big enough to cost him his life.
That is a tragedy and I have prayed for him every Sunday for seventeen years.
But he made the choice, Kael. You did not make it for him.
The vote that condemned him was unanimous and you were the youngest man at the table.
You carried out a sentence the club issued.
That sentence is on the club. It is on all of us.
It has been on all of us for seventeen years and we have all been carrying our share of it.
You have been carrying yours alone because you decided to.
And now I am telling you — I am telling you, as the man you came here to be told by — that the share you have been carrying alone is not actually yours alone, and Ronan does not own the rest of your life, and his widow does not belong to a man who lost the right to claim her seventeen years ago. "
I sit there.
The wolf inside me sits up.
He has been lying down in my chest for a week and he sits up now, and he listens, and Priest's words go into him and settle, and the wolf — for the first time in seventeen years — agrees out loud with something a human has said to me.
Yes, he says.
It is the second time he has spoken in seventeen years.
The first time was when he said get the boy.
This time he says: go get her, too.
I press my hands harder against my eyes.
"Priest," I say.
"What."
"I don't know how."
"You know how."
"I'm not a man who —"
"Kael Moran." He says my full name. He has not said my full name in years.
"You are exactly the man who. You are a man who has spent seventeen years learning patience, and waiting, and loyalty, and you are about to discover that the same skills that make you a good collector make you a good husband.
You sit on the porch. You stay where you are needed.
You do not push. You do not pull. You stay.
The woman is going to find her way to you or she is not, and your job is to be there when she does, and you are, by every measure I have ever known you by, a man who knows how to be there. "
I take my hands off my eyes.
I look at him.
He looks back.
He says, "Now get out of my chapel. I have other men's confessions to hear and yours is taking up too much of my afternoon."
I stand up.
I am unsteady. I have to brace one hand on the table for a second before I trust my knees.
"Priest."
"What."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Just go sit on a porch."
I go.
I walk back across the compound. The sun is high.
The snow is melting in the patches where it gets sun, refreezing in the patches where it does not.
Callum is in the eastern clearing with two of the younger wolves, working on form, and I can hear him laughing from a hundred yards away.
Willa is on the porch of the cabin with a coffee and a book, and I can see her from the path, the dark hair and the silver and the angle of her shoulder against the porch post, and the wolf in me — the wolf who has just told me to go get her, too — pricks his ears toward her like a compass.
I do not go up to the porch.
I keep walking, past it, to the clubhouse, to my office, to my desk. I have work. I am still the collector. The club has debts that have not paid themselves and brothers who are waiting on me to do my job. I sit down. I open the ledger. I work.
But the wolf in me stays facing east, toward the porch, toward her.
He does not move.
He waits.
He is a patient wolf. He has been a patient wolf his whole life and he knows how to wait, and Priest is right — I am a man who knows how to wait — and we have decided, the wolf and I, that we are going to wait on this porch for as long as it takes.
The waiting starts tonight.
I close the ledger. I get my coat.
I walk to the cabin.
I sit on the porch.
I do not knock. I do not ask. I just sit on the step, where I sat the night she told me she was not forgiving me tonight, and I wait.
After a while the door opens behind me.
She comes out. She does not say anything.
She sits down at the other end of the porch.
We watch the woods.
The wolf in me stays exactly where he is.
So do I.