Chapter 32 #2
Sixteen years I’ve been angry at my father for what happened to her.
Sixteen years I’ve carried the image of a woman who smiled through her own erosion while the pack took everything she had.
I built my rebellion on that image. I built my refusal on it.
Every time my father asked me to step up, to engage, to take my place, I threw her memory at him like a shield.
What the journal shows me is worse than the image and better than it.
Worse because she named it. She saw it happening and wrote it down and couldn’t stop it.
Better because she wasn’t passive. She fought.
She told my father she was struggling. She asked for help.
The help wasn’t enough, not because he didn’t try, but because the structure he’d inherited from his father didn’t have room for what she needed.
The structure.
Not the man. Not the bond. Not the love. The structure. The rigid hierarchy of obligation and expectation that treated the Alpha’s mate as a role rather than a person.
My father failed her. He knows it. I know it. But the journal shows me something I hadn’t considered: he failed her within a system he didn’t build and didn’t know how to change. His father’s pack. His father’s rules. The same inheritance of expectation that I’ve been running from for a decade.
I go back inside. Sit down. Open the journal to the last entries.
She writes about me. Pages and pages about me.
My first words, my first steps, the time I tried to shift at four years old and ended up as something she describes as “half boy, half angry otter.” She writes about my stubbornness, my refusal to be told what to do, the way I challenged every rule before I understood what rules were for.
He’s like me. Not like Chris, though he looks like Chris. Like me. The part of me that walked into Mistwood with a suitcase and a teaching certificate and no idea what she was getting into. The part that doesn’t bend.
I hope he doesn’t bend. I hope he fights every battle I didn’t fight.
I hope he breaks every structure I couldn’t break.
And I hope, when he finds the person who makes his wolf go still, he builds something new.
Not what Chris and I had. Not what Chris’s parents had.
Something that doesn’t require anyone to disappear.
The last entry is dated three weeks before she died.
Roan asked me today why I tell him stories about Edinburgh. I said because I want him to know there was a version of me that existed before this. He looked at me with those serious dark eyes and said, “But this version is the one I know.”
He’s right. This is the version he knows. And this version loves him more than any version of me has ever loved anything.
Whatever happens, he should know that.
I close the journal. I sit at the table in my cabin and I cry.
Not the quiet, controlled grief I’ve allowed myself over the years.
The ugly kind. The kind that shakes your ribs and makes your face wet and sounds like an animal in pain.
I cry for my mother and for the woman she was before Mistwood and for the woman she became and for the son she loved and couldn’t protect from the structure that consumed her.
And then I stop. I wash my face. I make more tea. I sit down with the journal and I read it again, from the beginning, and this time I read it not as her son but as a man who is building exactly the thing she hoped I’d build.
Something new.
My phone is on the table. I pick it up. Call my father.
He answers on the first ring. “Did you read it?”
“I read it.”
Silence. Not the weighted, tactical silence of the Alpha. The held breath of a man waiting to hear what his son thinks of the woman they both lost.
“She was extraordinary,” I say.
“Yes.” His voice is rough. “She was.”
“I want to do the claiming. The full ceremony, the clearing, the pack witness. I want Phoebe to have what Mum had without paying what Mum paid. I want to build the thing Mum wrote about. The new thing.”
He’s quiet for a long time. When he speaks, his voice is steady, but the steadiness is hard-won.
“Tell me what you need.”
“The clearing. Lanterns. You, Rebecca, Tom, Maggie. Nell.” I pause. “Keep it small. Keep it real. No politics. No positioning. Just people who matter.”
“When?”
“Full moon. Next week.”
“I’ll arrange it.”
“Dad.”
“Yes?”
“Thank you. For the journal.”
He clears his throat. “She left it for you. I just held onto it longer than I should have.”
He hangs up. I sit at the table with my mother’s journal and my cold tea and my phone in my hand and the strange, raw, unfamiliar feeling of a man who has stopped running.
Not because the running wasn’t necessary.
It was. Every year of rebellion, every refused meeting, every protocol violation, every night spent on the boundary instead of at the pack table.
All of it was necessary, because the structure my mother couldn’t break needed someone willing to stand outside it long enough to see it clearly.
I see it clearly now. And the woman who helped me see it is in the village, probably arguing with a cat, definitely writing notes in a notebook, almost certainly standing at her surgery window looking towards the forest with that expression she gets when she’s fitting another piece into the map she’s building of this place.
My mate. My partner. The woman who encountered the impossible and asked how to care for it.
I’m going to marry her. Not in the human sense, though we can do that too if she wants. In the way that matters to us. The pack witness. The clearing. Our scents on the stones.
I pick up the journal and hold it against my chest the way I held my mother’s hand when I was small. The cover is warm from the kitchen. The pages are soft with age.
Then I put it in the drawer beside my bed, where I’ll keep it. Where Phoebe can read it when she’s ready. Where our children, if we have them, can read it one day and know the woman who hoped for them before they existed.
I pull on my jacket and walk to Phoebe’s cottage.
The evening is cold and clear. Stars are coming out above the ridge. The village is settling into its quiet rhythms, lights in windows, smoke from chimneys, the distant sound of Graham closing up The Hare and Hound. My boots on the lane. My breath in the air.
I knock. She opens the door. She’s wearing one of my shirts over her joggers, her hair pulled back, reading glasses pushed up on her head. Behind her, the cottage is warm and bright and smells of the soup she’s made from the recipe I left on the counter two days ago.
“You’ve been crying,” she says. Not a question.
“My dad brought my mum’s journal.”
Her face changes. Not pity. Understanding. She steps back and opens the door wider.
“Come in,” she says. “Tell me everything.”
I go in. I tell her everything. She listens the way she listens to everything: with her whole self. And when I’m finished, she takes my hand and holds it and says the thing that proves, once again, that she is exactly the person my mother hoped I’d find.
“Let’s build the new thing,” she says.
So we do.