Epilogue #2
He has come in from his morning run. His cheeks are red.
His hair is wet from the snowmelt that is still falling out of the trees.
He is wearing a shirt that used to be Kael's and is now, by the slow logic of cabin life, technically Callum's.
He is reading the back of a cereal box that I have not bought because it amuses him to read the back of a cereal box that I have not bought, which Kael apparently bought yesterday because he was at the store and saw it and remembered Callum mentioning it once.
Kael is at the table across from him.
He is in his reading glasses. He has a coffee.
He is going through the club ledger before the day starts because the ledger is going to find him whether he goes to it or not and he prefers to go to it on his own time.
His hair is iron-grey and the silver at the temples has bled out further into the iron over the year, and the broken nose is the same broken nose, and his shoulders under the flannel are the shoulders of a man at forty who has finally stopped carrying something he was not supposed to be carrying.
He looks lighter. He looks — he looks like a man.
He looks up.
He looks at me at the stove.
He smiles.
It is — it is still not a full smile. He does not have a full smile.
He has the half-smile, the one I started seeing in the first weeks, the one that lives at one corner of his mouth and sometimes makes it to the other.
He gives me the half-smile across the kitchen.
The unburned half of his face goes first and the broken-nose half catches up a beat late, and his eye crinkles, and I — I have been seeing this smile for a year now and it still does something to me.
I lift the bacon out of the pan and I drain it on the paper towel and I look back at him.
I say, "Eat."
He says, "I'm waiting on you."
"You're slow."
"I'm being polite."
"Pour me a coffee."
He pours me a coffee. He sets it at my place.
He has done this every Sunday morning for a year and he does it the way he does everything, which is exactly the same way every time, with the same hand, with the same amount of cream, with the same small adjustment to the position of the mug so the handle faces my right hand because I am right-handed.
I sit down across from him.
Callum looks up from the cereal box. He looks at me.
He looks at Kael. He looks back at the cereal box.
He is pretending he has not noticed anything.
He has been pretending he has not noticed anything for a year.
He notices everything. He is his father's son.
He is also Kael's nephew. He sees us and he chooses, deliberately, to let us have whatever this is.
He has decided it is not his to interrupt.
We eat.
We eat the way we have eaten on Sunday mornings for a year.
Bacon and eggs and toast. Della's preserves on the toast. Coffee.
The radio quiet because Kael does not like the radio at breakfast. The sound of three sets of cutlery on three plates.
The sound of the woodstove ticking. The sound of the wind in the bare branches outside the cabin window.
The sound of the mountain doing what the mountain does.
Kael reaches across the table.
He does not say anything. He does not look up.
He just — slides his hand, palm up, across the wood toward me, with the casual deliberateness of a man who has done this every Sunday for a year and intends to do it every Sunday for the rest of his life.
His fingers stop in the middle of the table, palm open, waiting.
I take his hand.
I lay my palm against his palm. I lace my fingers between his fingers.
His thumb finds the inside of my wrist, where my pulse is, and he settles his thumb there the way he always settles his thumb there, and we hold hands across the kitchen table on a Sunday morning in March, in a cabin that was a ghost story for seventeen years, in a town built on pack law and hard choices.
Callum, across the table, reads the back of the cereal box and pretends he has not noticed.
I see him smile into his eggs.
I do not say anything about the smile.
He does not say anything about the hand.
We eat. We finish breakfast. The plates are cleared.
Callum gets up and announces he is going to the eastern clearing to work with the younger wolves on shift speed because two of them have been getting cocky and he is going to humble them and he will be back at lunch.
He kisses the top of my head on his way out. He claps Kael on the shoulder. He goes.
The cabin door closes behind him.
Kael and I are alone at the table.
He has not let go of my hand.
I have not let go of his.