21. Silas
Chapter twenty-one
Silas
She tells me about the dean’s office before I’ve finished processing that she’s still here.
Not still here in the literal sense—I know she’s here, I can feel her weight against my side with the blanket she pulled over our legs, her head tipped slightly toward my shoulder. Still here in the other sense. The one that matters.
After I showed my wolf on the sidewalk.
After what her aunt did with her mother’s history in front of me.
After coming home and choosing me and being clear-eyed about it.
She’s still here.
And she’s telling me about breaking into a dean’s office when she was seventeen with the animated energy of someone who has been waiting to tell this story and is pleased with the audience.
“For the record, it never would have happened if the window latch hadn’t already been broken,” she says. “That’s an important detail.”
“It doesn’t help your case,” I say.
“It absolutely helps my case,” she says. “And for the record”…
“There’s no record here.”
“You’re the record,” she says.
“I’m not a legal document.”
“You’re a witness. Witnesses count.”
I look down at her. She has her chin tipped up slightly, the angle I’ve learned she uses when she’s making a case she knows is weak and is committing to it anyway.
Her hair is loose from the afternoon, falling around her shoulders.
She looks softer in this light than she does anywhere else I’ve seen her..
Easier.
More herself, maybe. Though she’s always been aggressively herself in every situation I’ve seen her in.
“They killed a story you wrote,” I say.
“A good story. An important story. About the school board’s creative accounting practices, which nobody else was going to write about because everyone was afraid of Dr. Hendricks, who was a bully with a good vocabulary.”
“And your response to this was burglary.”
“Unauthorized access,” she says. “Through a pre-existing structural flaw in the building’s security.”
“You climbed in through a broken window.”
“I entered through an alternative access point.”
“At night.”
“Visibility was reduced, yes.”
“To steal a document.”
“To recover intellectual property that was rightfully mine.” She pauses. “I got it back, by the way. Published it in the local paper. Hendricks retired a year later, which I’ll leave without comment.”
“You’re very proud of this.”
“Enormously,” she says, without hesitation, and the laugh that comes with it is the real one, the unguarded version, and my chest expands with it.
I consider what I can tell her without turning the game into a confession.
“Your turn,” she says.
I think for a moment, considering the inventory of things that are true about me and selecting something true without making it a weight, a narrower category than it sounds.
“I bit Logan,” I say.
She lifts her head and looks at me.
“I’m sorry?”
“My brother, Logan. I bit him.”
“All toddlers bite. Nothing new there.”
“I was ten.”
“Oh. You bit your brother,” she says, like now it’s dawning on her. “Like, hard?”
“Oh yeah. He needed stitches.”
She stares at me for a moment. “Damn. Why?”
“He had something I wanted.”
“What did he have?”
“The remote control.”
She blinks. Then she laughs properly, bright and unfiltered, and presses her face briefly into my shoulder before pulling back to look at me again.
“You bit your brother hard enough to need stitches. Over a television remote.”
“My reasoning was different at ten.”
“How many stitches?”
“Six,” I admit.
“Ouch. Did the biting work?”
“Briefly. Then my father found out.”
“How bad was that?”
“Bad enough that I didn’t bite anyone again.”
She shakes her head, still smiling.
“Your turn,” I say.
“I already went.”
“You went first. I went. Now you go again.”
She considers this. “The burglary was my best one.”
“Give me the next best.”
She thinks for a moment. “I convinced my entire eighth-grade class that our substitute teacher was actually a famous novelist writing a book about middle school students and we were all being observed. They behaved perfectly for three weeks.”
I look at her.
“Three weeks,” I say.
“She was a wonderful substitute,” Norah says. “She deserved the three weeks.”
“But didn’t the other kids want to kill you when they found out?”
“I didn’t tell anyone until my ten-year high school reunion. By then, some of them had kids. They got it. Your turn.”
And here is where I would normally redirect. Give her an easy answer, one that closes the door rather than opens it.
I don’t do that.
“Okay. Here goes,” I say. “I spent most of my childhood trying to beat Logan. He’s older, bigger, stronger, and better in a fight. Better at most of what wolves are expected to be good at.”
I look toward the lamp. “My father noticed Logan early. He was always going to run this family. I think everyone understood that before Logan did.”
“And you,” she says.
“I understood it too,” I say. “I just refused to accept it for about fifteen years.”
“What did that look like?”
“Bad,” I say. “I was smarter than Logan in certain ways. Not better, just more strategic. I could read a situation faster, find the angle he missed, stay three steps ahead of where a problem was going. And I used that.”
I pause. “I put him and my father through the wringer with it. Every trick I could find. Every angle I could work. I was trying to prove that what I had was worth more than what he had.”
“Was it worth it?”
“It was worth something,” I say. “It wasn’t worth more. Different tools for different jobs.” I exhale. “Logan runs this family because Logan is built for it. I figured that out eventually.”
“How eventually?”
“Late enough to be embarrassing,” I say. “And then I decided if I couldn’t unseat him, I wasn’t going to compete at all. So, I stopped trying.”
She waits before speaking.
“The playboy thing.”
I glance at her.
“Henry said something,” she says. “In passing. At trivia.”
“What did he say?”
“That you were the entertaining one. I read between the lines. And I’m not immune to wolf gossip. Wolf gossip travels. I’ve never figured out how.”
I let that sit for a moment.
“It was easier,” I say. “Working because I was expected to and living the rest of it how I wanted. Not caring as much as Logan cares.” I pause. “It’s a comfortable position, not trying for the thing you can’t have.”
“Is it still comfortable?” she asks.
“Less than it was,” I say.
The blanket is over both of us—crocheted granny squares in eclectic colors that she pulled up from the end of the bed.
She is the most honest person I’ve been around in years.
She edits, she deflects, she makes jokes at exactly the right moment to avoid the question she’s not ready for.
When she does say something, it’s the real version.
No construction around it. No careful management of what the other person takes away.
I have been careful about what people take away from me for my entire adult life.
I am not doing that right now.
And the thing I notice, sitting here with the quiet around us and her worst moment becoming a shared memory instead of an immediate threat—is that it doesn’t feel dangerous. It feels like the first unguarded thing I’ve done in a long time.
“For what it’s worth,” she says, “I think street smarts are underrated.”
“You’re biased.”
“I’m observant,” she says. “There’s a difference.”
I look down at her. “You’re going to be difficult about that distinction.”
“For as long as it takes,” she says pleasantly.
She closes her eyes, a relaxed smile at the corners of her mouth. I lean my head back and breathe out.
I’m not ready to say the word to her.
But I will be.
At some point she finds my hand. I don’t know exactly when. I’m just aware of it—her fingers over mine, the warmth of it, easy and unannounced, like it’s been there before and is simply returning to its place.
I don’t move.
I stay with that. In her home, with her hand over mine and the evening creeping in around the edges of the room, I let it be what it is without putting a name on it.
Not yet.
But soon.