Chapter 32
What She Left Behind
Roan
My father brings the journal on a Thursday afternoon, four days after the fight.
She would have wanted you to have this. Take your time. Dad
I stand in my kitchen and look at it for a long time.
The cover is water-stained in one corner.
The spine is cracked from use, the pages swollen slightly with age.
My mother’s handwriting is visible along the edge where the book falls open naturally, a page she returned to often enough to break the binding.
I don’t read it. Not yet. I put the kettle on and make tea and sit down and wrap my hands around the mug and look at the journal the way you look at a door you’ve been standing in front of for twenty years.
Then I open it.
Her handwriting is smaller than I remember. Neat, precise, with a slight backward slant that my primary school teacher would have called distinctive. The first entry is dated nineteen years before I was born.
Arrived in Mistwood today. The cottage is smaller than advertised but the light is extraordinary.
Mountains on three sides. A forest that looks like it was here before anything else.
The school is a single room attached to the church hall, and the headmistress is a woman called Agnes who appears to run the village through sheer force of personality. I like her already.
The village itself is strange. I can’t put my finger on it. Everyone is friendly, genuinely so, but there’s something underneath the friendliness. A carefulness. As if every conversation is happening on two levels and I can only hear one of them.
I set the mug down. My throat has closed.
She wrote the way she talked. Direct, warm, observant.
The voice on the page is so completely hers that for a moment I’m twelve again, sitting at the kitchen table while she tells me about her day, and the loss of her is so sharp and so present that I have to close the book and press my palms against my eyes.
I breathe. I count. The grief isn’t new.
The grief has been with me for sixteen years, packed tight and filed under things I don’t look at.
But this is different. This isn’t memory, which fades and distorts and eventually becomes a story you tell yourself about a person you loved.
This is her voice, preserved in ink, unmediated by time.
I open the book again.
She writes about the school. The children.
The walk from her rented room to the church hall, the way the mist sits in the valley on autumn mornings.
She writes about Agnes and the other teachers.
About the pub, which was called The Hare and Hound even then, and the man behind the bar who poured generous measures and told her Mistwood grew on people like ivy on stone.
She writes about the forest.
There’s something about the trees here. I walked the path above the village yesterday afternoon and the air changed as soon as I passed the first oaks.
Thicker. Warmer. The light filtered through the canopy in a way that made me think of churches.
I stood still and listened and I swear the ground was humming.
A low vibration, below hearing, that I felt through the soles of my boots.
I mentioned it to Agnes. She smiled and said the forest had been here longer than the village and would be here long after. When I pressed, she changed the subject.
Everyone changes the subject.
I turn pages. The entries span months, then years. She met my father in the spring, six months after arriving. The entry is brief.
Met Chris Mistwood today. He came to the school to discuss something with Agnes and stayed to help me carry boxes to the storeroom.
He’s tall. Dark hair. The kind of face that makes you forget what you were doing.
He held the door for me and his hand brushed mine and I felt something I can’t describe.
Not attraction, though that’s there too.
Something under the attraction, like a current in deep water.
I can still feel the warmth where he touched me.
I read that line three times.
She writes about the bond without calling it that.
The warmth. The pull. The way her body oriented towards a man she barely knew with a certainty that frightened and fascinated her in equal measure.
She describes the same symptoms Phoebe described to me: heightened senses, temperature fluctuations, sleep disruption.
She didn’t know what was happening to her.
Nobody told her. She went to her GP and was told it was stress.
Chris came to dinner. He brought wine and a confidence that should be insufferable but somehow isn’t.
We talked for three hours. He asked about Edinburgh, about my family, about what brought me here.
I asked about his, and something closed behind his eyes.
A door, shutting. He changed the subject with a skill that told me he’d had practice.
I should be wary of a man who deflects questions that smoothly. Instead I invited him back for Friday.
She writes about falling in love. Not the word itself, not for a long time, but the shape of it.
The meals. The walks. The slow, careful way my father drew her into his world without telling her what that world was.
She noticed the oddness, the same careful silences Phoebe noticed, the same invisible fences around certain topics.
She asked questions. She got the same elegant non-answers.
And then, nine months after arriving, the truth.
He told me everything.
I’m sitting on the bathroom floor writing this because I can’t sit anywhere else. The bedroom smells like him and the living room is where he said the words and the kitchen is where I dropped the mug and it’s still in pieces on the floor.
He’s a wolf. His family. Most of the village. Wolves.
He shifted in front of me. In my living room. He asked if I was ready and I said yes because I thought I was, and then his body changed and he was something else, something enormous and dark and impossible, and he looked at me with golden eyes and waited.
I didn’t run. I don’t know why I didn’t run. I should have run. Every rational part of me says I should have run.
But the wolf looked at me the way Chris looks at me.
With the same patient, terrified tenderness.
And I understood, suddenly, that they were the same person.
That the man I’d been falling for and the impossible creature on my living room floor were one thing, not two, and the impossibility of it didn’t change what I felt.
I’m on the bathroom floor and I’m shaking and I don’t know what I’m becoming but I know I don’t want to leave.
I close the journal. Open it again. Close it.
I stand up and walk to the window. The village is quiet in the afternoon light. Smoke from chimneys. The distant clang of someone working in the forge. Children on the green, kicking a ball with the chaotic energy that suggests no one has explained the rules.
My mother sat on a bathroom floor and wrote words that could have been written by Phoebe. Word for word. The same shock. The same determination. The same stubborn refusal to leave despite every rational argument for it.
I pick up the journal again and turn to the entries about the emergence.
She writes about her body changing. The senses sharpening.
The temperature fluctuations. She writes about the dreams, the ones Phoebe has described to me, of running through the forest on four legs.
She writes about the first shift with a clinical precision that reminds me so strongly of Phoebe’s notebook that the comparison aches.
I shifted today. I don’t have words for it.
The feeling of my body becoming something else, the terror and the rightness of it existing simultaneously.
Chris was there. He talked me through it the way you’d talk someone through a panic attack, calm and steady and present.
I came back to myself on the floor with his hand on my back and his voice in my ear and I cried for ten minutes and then asked him if my tail was a normal length.
He laughed until he cried too.
She writes about the pack. About Chris’s father, who was Alpha then, a man she describes as decent but rigid, locked into a model of leadership that left no room for deviation.
She writes about the expectations placed on the Alpha’s mate: the ceremonies, the social obligations, the constant visibility.
I am never alone. Even when I’m alone, I’m not alone, because someone is always checking, always watching, always making sure the Alpha’s mate is where she should be and doing what she should be doing.
They mean well. I know they mean well. But the woman I was in Edinburgh, the one who spent Saturday mornings reading in bed and Tuesday evenings at the cinema and didn’t answer the phone if she didn’t feel like it, that woman is disappearing.
She’s being replaced by someone more useful.
Someone who smiles at pack functions and organises the solstice gathering and never, ever says she’s tired.
I’m tired.
The entry is undated. The handwriting is looser than the others, as if her hand was shaking.
I told Chris I was struggling. He held me and said he’d fix it. He didn’t fix it. He couldn’t. The structure doesn’t bend. The pack needs what the pack needs, and what the pack needs from the Alpha’s mate is everything.
I love him. I love him so much it makes my chest hurt. But love is not the same as enough, and I’m running out of enough.
I put the journal down. I push my chair back from the table. I walk outside and stand on the porch and breathe cold air until the burning in my eyes stops.