18. Silas #2
The irritation comes faster than I want it to.
There’s the condescension underneath the reasonableness, right on schedule.
Logan, who has never wanted the wrong thing, who has never had to fight for the right to want what he wants, telling me I don’t understand.
Logan who was handed everything I spent fifteen years trying to compete for, who accepted it with the equanimity of a man who never had to fight for it, and who now stands in the parking lot of our family’s operation looking at me with the patient expression of someone explaining a concept to a person who is trying very hard not to learn it.
“You don’t know anything about what this feels like.”
“I know enough.”
There it is again. Both of them using it, my father and my brother, like it’s the family position on things they can see that I can’t.
Like thirty-two years of being the one who wasn’t chosen has left me somehow incapable of understanding my own situation.
Like the middle son needs the heir and the patriarch to explain to him what is happening in his own chest.
“You sound like Father,” I say.
“Because he isn’t wrong.” He says it without apology, without inflection. Logan isn’t trying to win. He’s trying to make me stop pretending that the shape of this problem can be altered by wanting it badly enough.
He doesn’t move from the wall.
“Has she been asking questions?” he says.
I look at him. “About what?”
The deflection is automatic, and he sees through it immediately, which is the problem with Logan—he doesn’t need you to confirm anything. He only needs to watch your face for the half-second before you decide what to show him.
“She’s curious,” I say. “She asks about things she doesn’t understand. That’s who she is.”
I look past him toward the warehouse entrance. “She asked questions. Real ones. About wolves. About pack life. Things she didn’t know and wanted to.”
He absorbs that without interruption. “And you answered,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
What I want to say is: because she’s not judging.
Because leaving her alone with whatever version of wolves the human world has already built for her feels more dangerous than telling her something true.
Because she asked like she actually wanted to know, and I haven’t had a conversation like that in longer than I want to account for.
But I only say, “Because I want her to understand.”
Logan nods once, slowly, and looks away. When he speaks again his voice drops, more considered—not softer, just more deliberate.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
I look at him sharply. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means this has already gone past curiosity.” He turns back to me. “You’re not interested in her. You’re trying to bring her closer to your world. Maybe without meaning to. That’s what answering her questions does. That’s what today did.”
I open my mouth.
He keeps going.
“And you can’t walk that back once it starts.”
The words sit between us. I want to push against them but I can’t find the purchase to do it. That’s the most infuriating thing about arguing with Logan—he doesn’t give you bad logic to attack. He gives you accurate logic and expects you to be grateful for it.
“She asks,” I say. “I’m not manufacturing the interest.”
“No,” Logan says. “But you’re feeding it. And you know the difference.”
The warehouse door bangs as someone lets it swing too hard.
One of the men inside curses. Another laughs.
The sound travels out into the lot and disappears, and neither of us speaks, because we both know the next words matter.
I’m an adult man standing in my family’s parking lot being managed by my older brother, and I am aware of how that looks from the outside, yet I’m too tired to care.
Logan steps closer. Not in challenge. Enough that there is no room left in the conversation for deflection.
“Does she understand what this could cost her?” he asks.
The question is simple. It shouldn’t be difficult to answer.
For one second, I have nothing ready, and Logan sees the hesitation before I can do anything about it.
He always sees. He’s right, and I know it.
Norah understands wolves better than she did two weeks ago.
She understands more about pack culture, the shape of wolf life in this city, the private structures humans rarely see.
But that’s not the same as understanding consequences.
Not the same as understanding what happens when people in her world notice how often she appears with me.
For Norah, there would be no easy way back.
The thought drops into my chest with an unpleasant weight.
Logan watches it happen.
“She doesn’t,” he says. Not an accusation. A fact, stated with the flat accuracy of someone naming the weather. The heir naming a problem. The first-born doing his job.
I look toward the lit warehouse windows, the fence line at the far side of the property. Anywhere that isn’t his face. “No,” I say. “Not fully.”
Logan lets out a slow breath. “That’s what I mean,” he says.
I put both hands on the truck bed behind me, while irritation and exhaustion take up residence in my chest.
“What happens if staying here becomes too uncomfortable?” Logan says.
“For either of you. The political climate isn’t going to change.
Wolves are still fighting for every scrap they can get.
If she makes the choice to be with you, it would uproot her life, her relationships. Cut her off from everything she knows.”
The words hit with such directness that for a moment I think the ground has moved.
The thought has already crossed my mind—arriving without warning while I was reading her Neruda in the middle of the lake, a flash I didn’t invite to stick around long enough to inspect.
Logan is watching me. He sees whatever crosses my face.
“I’m not telling you to decide anything,” he says. “Not tonight.”
“Then why say it?”
“Because someone needs to say it before you’re too far in to hear it.”
The irritation surfaces again, less hot this time.
More tired. Tired of coming home to find myself in combat with my own family over my own life.
Tired of the roiling in my gut every time the conversation lands here.
Logan is right the way he is always rationally, infuriatingly right, and knowing it makes the irritation pointless.
I’m standing in the parking lot of the operation that will never be mine holding both of those things and not sure what to do with either.
Logan steps back.
“Be careful,” he says. Same two words everyone keeps arriving at independently—my father, my brother, probably Greer if he had any interest in stating the obvious. “With her. With yourself.”
He turns and walks back into the warehouse, his boots steady on the concrete.
I watch him go and think: he’s right about everything and I’m going to do it anyway. That’s the part I can’t tell him. That’s the part that would really worry him.
For one irrational second, all I want to do is get back in my truck and drive to Norah’s. But I don’t. I pick up the clipboard someone left on the dock, and I go inside instead.