11. Josie
Josie
Here is something nobody tells you about a lie. The dangerous ones aren't the lies that fall apart. They're the ones that work.
I panicked into this thing weeks ago at my kitchen table. The diner dinner with Finn was supposed to be one careful little brick in it. Instead I've apparently built something the whole town now wants to come look at.
And the building hasn't stopped. We've settled into the rotation by now, the three of them and me, a day each, the way I planned it, like a campaign. A kayak with Hudson. A job site with Logan. The diner with Finn. Then around again.
And in between, the small stuff. Coffee runs and a walk down Main.
Hudson turning up at the school gate one afternoon with iced coffees for the whole staff, which Lily has not let me hear the end of.
Logan fixing a hinge in my classroom that nobody asked him to fix.
Finn texting eat something at noon like a man who's decided this is his job now.
It's been days of this. Days of being touched in public and talked about in private and slowly, without anyone deciding to, becoming a thing the town tells time by. And every day the lie gets a little more real and a little harder to remember I'm supposed to give it back.
By now Dottie's intelligence network has done what it does, and the news has gone everywhere news goes in this town, which is everywhere.
I find out exactly how everywhere when I stop at the bakery on Main for a coffee before school.
The woman behind the counter, whom I've spoken maybe forty words to in five years, leans across the pastry case.
“I heard about you and the Morrow boy,” she says, in the soft, thrilled voice people use for engagements and surgeries.
“There's no, we're not,” I start, on pure reflex. Then I have to swallow it. Because yes we are. That's the whole point. This is the thing I asked for, and I should really stop being startled every single time it works. “We're taking it slow,” I say instead.
“Slow.” She nods like I've said something profound. “That's how the good ones go. My Harold and I took it slow. Forty-one years.” She leans closer, lowers her voice to a register meant for state secrets. “And I hear there's more than one.”
“I, um.”
“You don't have to say. A girl keeps her cards.” She's already sliding my coffee across, and she doesn't charge me for it, which is somehow the most alarming thing that's happened all morning. “On the house. For young love.”
“You really don't have to.”
“I really do. I've been waiting six years to do that, honey. Let me have it.”
It's the one kind of lie I can manage with a straight face, the taking it slow part. The kind that's technically true. You can't go slower than a relationship that doesn't exist.
I take my free coffee of guilt out into the June sun and walk to school.
It does not help that this is the last week of term.
The whole town's already soft and sentimental, the way it gets every June.
A few more days and the room empties out, the little chairs go up on the little tables, and I hand twelve children back to summer and become a woman with twelve weeks of unstructured time and a fake pack to dismantle.
The kids can feel it coming the way they feel everything, in their feet. They've been feral since Monday. I've broken up two arguments about whose turn it is to be line leader and confiscated one rock that Atlas described, with total sincerity, as his.
Past the hardware store, where old man Smith lifts his hand off his broom to wave. Past the Clip & Curl, where I make the tactical error of glancing in the window.
Cynthia Morrow is at her station with a client half-foiled. She sees me, and she lights up like the whole salon's wired to her mood. She mouths something through the glass that I'm fairly sure is call me, her hand doing the little phone shape next to her face.
I wave back with the bright, composed confidence of a woman with everything under control.
I am not a woman with everything under control. I've lost the thread entirely and I'm running on nerve and momentum.
It has been one day. One public dinner with one alpha, and the whole county has decided I'm finally building a pack, which around here is roughly the excitement level of a royal engagement. They've only seen me with Finn so far. They don't know about the other two yet.
And the awful thing, the thing I can't say out loud, is that it's working. I told a lie to get out of one bad afternoon at a reunion, and it's grown a whole town around it, and some traitor part of me is enjoying it.
By Thursday it's worse, because by Thursday Cynthia has plans.
I know this because she finds my number.
I never gave Cynthia my number. I have a brief, vivid nightmare about the chain of custody on that, Dottie to Marie to the salon appointment book to who knows, and then my phone is buzzing with a text from an unknown Hollow number that can only be one person.
Josie!! It's Cynthia (Finn's mom) :) I know you two are keeping it low key and I respect that SO much.
Just one tiny thing. I'm doing my big roast a week this Sunday, I've finally got Gemma to promise she won't book herself a single emergency that whole day, and I would LOVE to have you.
Nothing fancy!! Just family :) :) Finn knows the way.
I read it four times.
Just family. Dinner. At her house. Her table, her roast, Gemma wrangled into one whole evening off the clock, all of us around it like something true.
And the truly inconvenient thing is that it helps. Nothing notarizes a relationship like a Sunday roast with the mother, and that's exactly the kind of bulletproof I need before the reunion. I should be relieved. I am, a little.
What I can't account for is the other part. The part that read just family and felt something flip over that had nothing to do with the plan and everything to do with the way Finn's hands move.
I put the phone face-down on the snack table and inform Lily, very calmly, that the operation is going so well I'm being invited to Sunday dinner by a family that doesn't technically exist.
“You told one lie to your mother and accidentally gave this town a love story,” Lily says, not looking up from the cracker situation. “People love a love story. You gave them one. Now they want the sequel and the merch.”
“I gave them a logistics solution to a phone call.”
“You held Finn Morrow's hand in public. Finn Morrow has never held anything in public except a grudge.” She licks cracker dust off her thumb.
“You've gone and made the man legible, Josie.
The whole town's been trying to read him his whole life and you handed them the subtitles. Of course they're losing it.”
She's not wrong. And the part under that, the part I'm not saying out loud to anyone including myself, is that the practice is working. Not on the town. On me.
That was the part I didn't plan for.
I built this whole arrangement like a scheduling problem.
Three alphas, a month, a calendar, all of it neat and containable.
And somewhere in the middle of a kayak and a half-built deck and a diner booth my body stopped reading from the same page.
Now I've got a week of them under my skin and no way to get them back out.
Hudson's scent, juniper and rain, came off him in a wave the second he hauled me up out of the lake. The embarrassing little sound my instincts made about it before I could stop them.
The way some old quiet part of me leaned toward Logan over a board of pine. Just leaned, like a plant toward a window, before I caught it and straightened up.
And Finn. Finn's thumb on my knuckles. The way his hand closed over mine before he'd decided to do it. The woodsmoke and clove of him close enough to taste. I've got you, and the slow warm pull low in me that had nothing to do with selling anything to anyone.
Three alphas, on a schedule, doing exactly what I asked. Being close. Being convincing. And every single time, the wanting forgets it's pretend a half second before my brain catches up and hauls it back.
I keep telling myself that's just biology. Put an omega in arm's reach of three alphas for a week and of course something hums. It doesn't mean anything. It's not allowed to mean anything.
The telling keeps not taking.
Which is how I end up at The Tipsy Berry on Friday night, because Lily decides what I need, after a week of being publicly adored for a relationship I invented, is a beer and a dark corner and no one asking when the wedding is.
The Tipsy Berry is the good kind of loud. Warm light and old wood and the smell of hops and somebody's fries, half the Hollow packed in on a Friday with the day shaken off them.
Ethan's behind the bar. Lily's Ethan, who gives her a look across the room that could power the place. And behind him, working the taps with the brisk economy of a woman who built this room with her own two hands and will not be having a single bit of nonsense in it tonight, is Scarlett Blake.
I know Scarlett the way everyone in the Hollow knows Scarlett, which is to say everyone knows her and nobody would dare claim they're close. She owns the place.
Dark auburn hair stabbed through with a pen, a bar rag over one shoulder, a tattoo of something leafy on her forearm, and an expression that has personally ended several conversations before they started.
She's pouring a beer and saying something over her shoulder to a man at the end of the bar that makes him laugh and then look wounded, which from Scarlett is apparently the same gesture.
“Two of whatever's local,” Lily says, leaning in. “And tell me everything. But first” , she tips her head toward the end of the bar , “watch the brewer for a second. Tell me what you see.”
The brewer. I follow her eyes.