Epilogue The Ore Vein
The desk is bigger than I remembered it being.
I'd sat across from it for years — on the other side, the supplicant's side, the side where you wait for someone to finish reading before you're allowed to speak.
Now I'm behind it, and the leather chair fits differently than I expected, and the view from here is just the same room from a different angle.
I sign the last page and set down the pen.
The asset separation from Foxglen finalized last week. Clean cut, documented, witnessed by three Elder Council representatives and two independent attorneys.
Callum's pack is his pack.
Silverpine is mine.
My father signed his retirement from the Alpha position four months ago in this same room, in this same chair, and whatever he felt about it he kept to himself.
I pull the next folder toward me.
Asset inventory, northern holdings. I run my finger down the list — timber rights, mineral surveys, the grazing territories that border Nightridge's western edge —
My finger stops.
Northern ore vein. Status: pending transfer. Counterparty: Nightridge Alpha.
The door opens. Lachlan comes in carrying tea, which he does without being asked and without making anything of it, the way he does most things. He sets the cup beside my hand, bends down, presses his lips to the top of my head.
I lean back in the chair and look up at him. "When are we doing the transfer on this ore vein?"
His hand pauses on the teapot.
He frowns. Thinks about it. The thinking takes long enough to be real.
"What ore vein?"
Two seconds of silence in the afternoon light.
I regard him. He looks at the list. His frown is entirely authentic, the frown of a man searching his memory for something that is not there.
I start laughing. The kind that doesn't ask permission.
"It's nothing," I say.
I stand up and step into him and put my arms around his neck. He folds around me immediately, the way he always does, like the geometry of it has been solved and doesn't need to be recalculated.
He kisses me. Then his arms tighten slightly and he says, "You said you wanted to visit Bran this week. We could go now. Make it for lunch."
I think about Bran's kitchen, the smell of something always on the stove, the way he'll look at Lachlan and look at me and try very hard not to look too pleased with himself.
"Let's go," I say.
The sun through the study windows crosses both our shadows where they fall together on the floor, and I leave the folder on the desk — the ore vein can wait, it has been waiting for years, it belongs to him anyway — and we go.
THE END