Chapter 3
Chapter
Three
Reese got home and washed her work shirt in the bathroom sink, wrung it out, and hung it over the shower rod. She walked back out into the living room. It was furnished with a brown couch, a lamp, and a framed print of a lighthouse that came with the place. Like everything else.
Her only real belongings were her clothes, the envelope of money tucked inside a hollowed-out paperback on the top shelf of the closet, and the jar of green onions regrowing in water on the kitchen windowsill.
She'd bought the onions for forty-nine cents, six weeks ago. She had used them down to the white ends, stood them in a jelly jar, and they had grown back twice already. It was a trick Reese had learned from her mother, back before she'd remarried.
She made a dinner of eggs and toast, and a few snips of green onion.
She ate at her small table and worked out her budget in a composition notebook she bought at the dollar store.
Rent was paid through the end of the month.
The envelope in her hiding spot had two hundred and six dollars.
Payday was on Friday. The prenatal visit she still hadn't scheduled went at the bottom of the column, the same place she wrote it every night.
She had looked up the clinic's prices. She could probably manage her first visit.
The problem was the endless appointments and medical care that came with being pregnant.
She was going to have to apply for state health insurance, and that meant paperwork, and forms with her name on them.
Until she figured out how to do it without leaving a trail for Wade, she kept finding reasons to wait.
She washed her plate and her pan and stood at the window, watching the evening sun turn gold over the rooftops across the street. She had made a life in Fate Mountain from almost nothing, and most nights it was enough to let her relax and sleep.
She got ready for bed and lay down with the phone she had bought at a Walmart in Hood River.
She read the news and played four rounds of solitaire.
Then an ad came up between rounds. It showed a couple on a porch.
The man's arm was around the woman, and there was a paw print in the corner. mate.com. FIND YOUR FATED MATE.
Stella had met Blaze on mate.com. Half the town had met the other half on the dating app. Nell had just been gushing about hoping she'd find her fated mate on there earlier today. She'd suggested Reese sign up for it too. Apparently, the algorithm had never been wrong.
Reese looked at the ad for a long time. Then she tapped it, and her heart started beating faster.
The form wanted a name. She typed Reese, then left the last name field blank until the form highlighted it in red and wouldn't let her continue. She typed Walker. It was her maiden name, but entering it still made her uneasy.
Age, twenty-six. Species had a dropdown two screens long, wolf, bear, mountain lion, hawk, fox, on and on, and a checkbox at the top that said Human. She checked it.
The questionnaire came next. Favorite season.
How she spent a free Sunday. How she handled conflict.
She looked at that one for a while. The choices were things like talk it through and need space first. There was no box for leave the state.
She picked need space first and kept going, answering honestly when she could and keeping the rest to herself.
Then the screen asked, If you were a vegetable, what would you be?
She looked up. The jelly jar sat on the windowsill, the new green tops already two inches above the rim. Cut down to almost nothing, regrowing from scraps and tap water on a windowsill.
Green onion, she typed. You can cut it to nothing and it grows back.
The form wanted a photo. She checked her phone.
It only had six pictures on it, all photos of her diner schedule.
But in her wallet, flat behind a dead insurance card, she had a printed photo from six years ago.
Her old roommate had taken it at Priest Lake the summer Reese was twenty.
Her hair was wet around her shoulders, her nose was sunburned, and her head was tipped back mid-laugh.
It was a photo of the woman she was before Wade took the light from her eyes.
She photographed the print and cropped the white border away. The girl in the picture looked back at her from the screen. Reese barely recognized her, but she uploaded it anyway. It was the only photo she had.
Username. She looked at the time, eleven fifty-two. Night Owl. The bio box she filled with one line. Just moved to a new town to start over.
Her thumb sat over the submit button for a few seconds. She thought about Blaze on one knee in the diner, changing Stella's shoes for her. She pressed SUBMIT.
The screen said, FINDING YOUR PERFECT MATCH. Reese put the phone on the mattress and went to check the lock on the front door for the fifth time. She used the bathroom, washed her hands, and got back in bed, almost forgetting about the app. Her phone dinged with a notification.
She turned her head toward the sound and saw the screen glowing on the mattress beside her. She then reached over to pick it up.
Congratulations! We've found your fated mate.
For a second, she stared at it, her heart pounding. She felt dizzy, even though she was lying down. Then she tapped the banner, and the app opened.
The profile loaded. It said 100% MATCH beside a username.
Silent Wolf. Below that, a photo of a quiet-looking man at some backyard gathering, dark hair, hazel eyes, caught a beat before he was ready for it.
He was a thirty-two-year-old wolf shifter.
The bio said, I work with computers. Love a quiet night and soft jazz.
She sucked a breath, staring at his picture. An algorithm that had never been wrong had just connected her to a handsome stranger, and she had no idea where he was. He could be on another continent or four blocks away.
The desire for love she'd been carrying since seeing Stella and Blaze that morning flared for a second, then turned into dread. She looked at his photo again, checking for danger. The hands, loose at his sides. The shoulders, down.
He had a face that looked more comfortable listening than speaking, caught off guard by the camera and not trying to hide it.
She had spent four years learning to read men at a glance, and he seemed like the kind of man who didn't take up more space than he needed.
But she didn't trust her own judgment. Wade had read that way too when they'd first met.
Besides, she was still legally married. She hadn't filed for divorce because filing would create a paper trail Wade could follow back to her. She was four months pregnant with her abuser's child. She had two hundred and six dollars and three shirts and a car that started on the second try.
The website wanted to introduce her to her fated mate, not a date, not a maybe. The rest of her life would be decided by that single match.
She couldn't hand a kind-eyed stranger a married woman, another man's baby, and a reason for a violent man to come to town. The algorithm had matched him with the woman she was before Wade, not the one she was now. That woman was long gone.
The phone chimed again. A prompt this time. Say hello to Silent Wolf. Most 100% matches exchange messages within the first day.
The message box sat empty and waiting. She put her thumb on the text field and typed hi. She looked at the word, deleted it, and watched the cursor blink on an empty text field.
She went into the settings instead. Account. Privacy. Delete account, in small red letters at the bottom. There was a confirmation screen after she tapped it. Are you sure? Your match data will be permanently removed. Her thumb hung over the red button. Permanently removed.
Her profile and account would be gone instantly. She'd been in hiding for three months and had just opened herself up to something that could be critically dangerous. But... then she thought about Stella and Blaze.
Reese closed the app with the account still active. She plugged the phone into the charger, set it on the nightstand, and turned off the lamp.
She put a hand on her belly and said, "We're going to be fine."