2. Josie
Josie
There's a particular walk a woman does when she's just ruined her own life and has to re-enter a building like she hasn't. Shoulders back. Chin level. Coffee cup held like a credential.
I do that walk across the gravel, and I almost pull it off, except that a preschool at rest time is the quietest place on earth and the door has a hinge with opinions.
It announces me like a town crier. Lily looks up from the rocking chair in the fish-tank glow, takes in my face, and her whole body goes alert, like a pointer scenting a downed bird.
I sit on the story-time stool, which puts my knees somewhere around my ears, and stare at the carpet.
She lets me have exactly one minute of it.
“What did you do.”
“Nothing.”
“Josie.”
“I handled it.”
“Oh no,” she says, with relish. “Tell me everything.”
“There's nothing to tell. Gerald's real, by the way. You were right. It's Gerald.”
“It's gerald?” she whisper-screams.
Across the room, Atlas stirs on his mat, smacks his lips, goes back under. We freeze like burglars until his breathing evens out.
“Accountant. Pine Valley. His own firm, Lily. His own firm.”
“Of course it's his own firm.” She wheels her chair closer, fish-tank light sliding across her face. “Okay. So she ambushed you, you said no thank you, you held the line. Right?”
I look at the fish.
“Josie. Right?”
The fish looks back at me with more sympathy than I'm about to get from anyone else in this room.
“I told her I have a pack.”
Lily's mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. Her hand comes up slowly to cover it, and above her fingers her eyes have gone wide and bright and thrilled, which is the worst part, because that's not concern. That's a woman watching her favorite show get renewed.
“You don't have a pack,” she says, into her hand.
“I'm aware.”
“You can't lie. You physically cannot lie. You told me you liked my bangs last year and then apologized about it for two days.”
“The bangs were a lot, Lily.”
“I know the bangs were a lot, that's not the point.” Atlas stirs again. We freeze again. She drops to a whisper so furious it's almost ultrasonic. “What exactly did you say. Words. In order.”
So I tell her. The voice. The ambush. Sandra from book club.
The no pressure. The part where my mother deployed Cara like a closing argument.
And then the part where the worry drained out of her voice for the first time in living memory, and the part where she cried, and the part where I stood in a gravel lot and told her my pack couldn't wait to meet everyone.
Lily listens the way she listens to the kids' wilder stories, nodding along, completely present, taking in every detail. When I finish, she sits back, and the fish tank burbles, and twelve children breathe in the dark.
“Your mom thinks you have three alphas,” she says slowly. “Coming to the reunion. In a month.”
“Four weeks.”
“Josie.”
“I counted on the way in.”
“And she's told people.”
“She was dialing before we hung up. I could hear it in her goodbye.” I pull my knees up onto the stool, which is not built for it, and balance there like a gargoyle.
“That's not paranoia, Lil, that's data. The woman had my cousin's engagement on the family chat before the ring was on.
She's had nothing to report about me in six years.
Six years of telling Aunt Deb I'm focusing on my career. This is going out like a wedding announcement.”
“Okay.” Lily claps once, softly, the way she does at the start of craft time. “Two options. Option one, you call her back and tell her the truth.”
“I can't.”
“You can. People do it constantly. 'Mom, I panicked, there's no pack.'“
“You didn't hear her, Lil.” And the soft spot opens up, right where it always sits.
“She cried. Happy cried. She called for Dad.
I've been the thing she worries about at book club for six years, and for one phone call I wasn't. If I call back now, I don't just take away the pack.
I hand her back the worry with interest. She'll do the brave voice, the 'of course, sweetheart, as long as you're happy' voice, and then she'll worry twice as hard forever. Because now I'll be single and a liar.”
Lily looks at me for a long moment.
“You know that's deranged, right? Lovingly. As your best friend. The math you just did is deranged.”
“The math is airtight.”
“So that's option two, then.” She pulls her chair closer, and the delight is back. The terrible delight. “You find three alphas willing to fake-pack you for one family reunion.”
“When you say it out loud it sounds insane.”
“It is insane. It's also the plot of every movie I've made you watch since 2019, and you're going to do it, because I just watched your face do the math and pick this.”
She's already reaching behind her for the craft cart. She comes back with a clipboard and the fat purple marker, the one that's supposed to smell like grape and smells like regret, and writes across a sheet of construction paper in teacher-perfect letters: PACK CANDIDATES.
“Lily.”
“Criteria first.” She underlines it. “Single.
Actually single, not Huckleberry single, because if you borrow someone's situationship for this, Dottie will have it on the specials board by Friday.
Plausible, meaning no one who flinches when you touch their arm.
Discreet, because this town runs on gossip the way other towns run on water.
And willing to stand in your parents' backyard and lie to your entire family, including your mother, who interrogates like a sweet-faced fed.”
“And here's the one thing you've actually got going for you.” She taps the marker on the clipboard.
“Your whole family's in Pine Valley. Forty minutes might as well be the moon.
Your mother couldn't pick a single Hollow alpha out of a lineup, so whoever we choose walks in as a total stranger. Clean slate.”
“That's the first encouraging thing anyone's said to me today.”
“I'm very supportive.”
“You forgot 'able to act.'“
“That's what plausible means. Keep up.” Marker poised. Then she lowers it, and her whole face changes. “Oh no.”
“What.”
“Touch.” She says it the way other people say iceberg.
“Josie. Think about Cara and her pack for one second.
They don't perform anything. He hands her coffee before she asks.
She fixes his collar without looking. They kiss her cheek on the way past like it's breathing.
That's what a real pack looks like, and it can't be faked cold.
Your family will clock three strangers who don't know how to touch you inside of two minutes. A whole backyard of them, watching, and three alphas hovering around you like coworkers at a retirement party.”
My stomach drops, because she's right, and I should have gotten there first. I was picturing three alphas standing near me. My mother is going to be watching for three alphas who love me. Those are different shows entirely, and she's seen the real one up close for thirty years.
“So we'd have to practice,” I say slowly.
“Weeks of it. Coffee orders, inside jokes, how you like your eggs, which one carries your bag. And touch. Hand-holding, cheek kisses, the arm around the chair, all of it on autopilot before you get anywhere near that driveway.” Lily delivers this with the solemnity of a doctor who is enjoying herself enormously.
“Three alphas. Rehearsing how to love you. Daily. For accuracy.”
“For accuracy,” I repeat.
I'd love to report that all of me hates this plan. But I'm an omega who hasn't been touched past a handshake in six years, and some low, traitorous part of me has already leaned into the hypothetical cheek kiss.
I ignore it. I've had practice.
“Go,” Lily says, tapping the paper. “Single alphas. Every one you know.”
And this is where it gets embarrassing, because we both go quiet, and the quiet stretches long enough that the fish does a full lap.
Huckleberry Hollow is not a big town. It's a wonderful town. The diner knows your order, the creek babbles like it's showing off, everyone waves. But the single-alpha population is small and closely monitored, and we burn through it in under a minute.
“The Olsen brothers.”
“They just graduated high school,” I say, not even dignifying it.
“Tom from the feed store.”
“Sixty-eight.”
“The new EMT.”
“Engaged.” I don't even look up from the list. “You told me yourself this morning. The nurse, in Pine Valley.”
“So I did.” Lily crosses him off.
“Dr. Kemp.”
“Dating my dentist.”
“Carl Tubbs.”
“Banned from the festival pie contest. It made the regional paper, and my mother reads the regional paper.”
“Beckett Fletcher.”
“Up a mountain. Always up a mountain. I need a alpha who can sit through a potato salad, not one who'll rappel out the bathroom window if someone twists an ankle in the parking lot.”
“Aiden Lee.”
“He's Finn's best friend, and I'm already asking Finn. I'm not turning this into a Finn convention.”
“What about Rowan?” I say. “The brewer at the Tipsy Berry.”
Lily shakes her head. “Hung up on somebody, Ethan says. Has been for ages, won't do a thing about it. No use to us, his head's already full.”
“Okay, so that's basically the entire eligible alpha population of Huckleberry Hollow and we've got nothing.”
Then her eyes light up.
“Hudson Grant.”
“Hollow Creek Hudson?”
“He's single, he's gorgeous, he's charming, and he once spent an entire town meeting pretending to be his own twin from out of town just to see how long it would take Pete to notice. Forty minutes, Josie. He committed to a bit for forty minutes against a professional. The man was built for this.”
She's not wrong. Hudson's the kind of charming that should be regulated, the kind that makes you grin back before you've decided to. He'd say yes just for the story. Honestly, I'm more worried he'd enjoy it too much.
She writes HUDSON in grape-scented block letters.
“Logan Walker,” I say, and then immediately feel weird about it, because Logan's been fixing the playground fence all month and I may have noticed his forearms in a way that was not entirely about carpentry. “He'd help. If I asked. He helps everyone.”
“He rebuilt my porch step the same afternoon I mentioned it,” Lily says. “I mentioned it at the post office. He wasn't even there. It got back to him by two and he was on my porch by four.”
She writes LOGAN.
“Okay. Two charming, kind, plausible alphas. We need a third.”
And we both already know. The list has been heading there since the fire engine went past this morning.
It's been heading there, honestly, since two months ago, on a night I am sworn on a stack of construction paper never to discuss, when Finn Morrow ended up owing me the kind of favor a man like Finn would rather die than have outstanding.
“Say it,” Lily says.
“No.”
“Say his name.”
“He'll say no. He says no to everything. He said no to a second slice of Dottie's pie once. She still brings it up.”
“He owes you, Josie.” She leans in, fish-light flickering, marker raised. “You've been sitting on that favor for two months like a dragon on one single coin, and you said, and I quote, 'I'm saving it for something he'll hate.'“
I did say that. It felt great at the time.
Lily writes FINN on the list, underlines it twice, and caps the marker with the click of a judge's gavel.
Rest time ends the way it always does, with Atlas sitting bolt upright like he's been summoned and the rest of the room surfacing in waves.
We fold the mats. We do snack. We do the post-nap hair repair line, where I fix four ponytails and reassure one child that her sock situation is recoverable.
The room runs and I run it, and the entire time, the list sits folded in my back pocket, radiating.
Pickup starts at three thirty.
Junie's mom comes in smelling like the bakery she runs, all three of her alphas presumably elbow-deep in flour down the street, and Junie launches across the room at her with the family portrait held high.
“It's us! And Biscuit!”
“It is us.” Her mom crouches, receives the drawing with appropriate ceremony, then looks at the back of it, puzzled. “What's this on the back, ladybug?”
I freeze by the cubbies.
“That's for Miss Josie's alphas,” Junie reports, at volume, to the entire pickup crowd. “For when she gets them. I left room.”
Three other parents look at me. One of them, bless her, looks at me the way you'd look at a sad dog in a commercial.
“That's so sweet,” Junie's mom says, with careful diplomacy, and ushers her daughter out the door.
Lily appears at my shoulder with my bag, my jacket, and the expression of a general.
“Okay,” she says. “Quick review. What are you going to lead with?”
“The favor.”
“No, no. Don't open with the IOU, you'll put his back up before he's heard a word. Pitch it first, make it sound survivable, then remind him he owes you when he tries to say no.” She stuffs the jacket into my arms. “What are you not going to do?”
“Apologize before I've said anything.”
“And?”
“Turn red.”
“You're already red,” she says, and spins me by the shoulders, points me at the door, and through the window, down the block, the firehouse sits in the afternoon sun with its bay doors open like it has no idea what's coming.
“Nap time gave us a list. Pickup gave you a deadline. Go ruin that man's afternoon.”