40. Norah
Chapter forty
Norah
It’s been three days, and I’m finally up to taking care of business.
I call Penny first. It rings twice. She picks up on the second ring, meaning she’s been watching her phone.
“Norah.”
She says my name the way she says it when she’s been waiting and is relieved but isn’t going to say so directly.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.” A pause. I can hear her reading the quality of my hey—Penny has been reading my heys since I was four years old and she was seven. “Where are you?”
“In bed,” I say. At least that’s not a lie.
The silence on the other end is the silence of Penny not saying what she’s thinking.
“I’m fine,” I say quickly. “I’m completely fine. Car accident—nothing serious. I’m just taking it easy.”
“Car accident,” she repeats.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure you’re fine?”
“I’m fine, Penny. Nothing more than a fender bender.”
Another silence. “Okay,” she says, in the tone she uses when she is accepting information she doesn’t fully believe and is choosing not to press. “Where?”
“About three hundred miles north of Larkin. We were…” I stop. “We left. Silas and I. We were on our way to Paxton.”
The silence this time is a different shape.
“Paxton,” she says.
“It’s a small town. There’s a wolf pack there, integrated, and he has family connections and a job prospect at a mill. We’re still going.”
Penny is quiet for a long moment. I can hear her breathing, the small sounds of her kitchen—the creak of the chair she always sits in when she’s having a hard conversation, the click of her putting something down on the counter.
“You left,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Without telling me.”
“I sent you a text.”
“Norah.”
“I know,” I say. “I know. I’m sorry. It happened fast, and I wasn’t sure how to explain it in a way that would make sense before I’d done it. I knew if I’d called you first, you would have talked me through all the reasons to wait, and I didn’t want to wait anymore.”
Another silence. “Was I going to talk you out of it?”
I think about that honestly. “No,” I say. “But you were going to make me think about it for longer than I had the capacity for.”
Penny makes a sound that might be a laugh and might be something else. “Fair,” she says.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner,” I say. “I’m sorry about the text. You deserved better than that.”
“Yes,” she says. “I did.” But the sharpness is already going out of it—Penny doesn’t hold grudges. It’s one of her best qualities, the anger moves through her fast and clean, and what’s left is just her. “Tell me about Paxton.”
So, I do.
I tell her about the pack that made a different decision, about the town that knows its wolves and has built a solid community with humans over decades.
I tell her about Declan and Anya, about their guest bedroom, about the apartment we think we can rent.
I tell her about the mill and how Silas is going to talk to the owner and be introduced to the pack.
It’s impossible to keep the excitement out of my voice when I tell her about the space over the hardware store with good afternoon light. The town does not have a bookstore, and it feels as though that absence was left there on purpose.
Penny listens. She’s always been good at listening—better than me, honestly, less likely to jump in with a connection or a parallel story. She’s always been a champ at letting someone fill up the space. Another one of her best qualities.
“And Silas,” she says, when I’ve run out of Paxton.
“What about him?”
“Is he good to you?”
The question is simple. It’s also the only question that matters to Penny, has always been the only question, the thing she’s been asking in various forms since I was old enough to bring someone home.
“Yes,” I say.
“Not just good to be around. Good to you.”
“Yes,” I say. “Both.”
“I would have liked to meet him before you drove off into the night with him.”
“I know,” I say. “You will. We’re coming back, Penny. This isn’t disappearing. It’s a different shape.”
“A different shape,” she says. “Okay.” And then, after a beat: “Is the bookshop on Norwood going to be okay without you?”
“Mark and Jesse have the floor,” I say. “And Abigail is filling in until a new manager can be hired. It’s covered.” I think about the three of them—Mark and Jesse, and Abby quietly holding the rest of it together.
I hear Penny exhale—the long exhale of someone releasing an anxious breath they’ve been holding. The protective sister exhale. The one that means she’s done assessing and has arrived at acceptance, because she’s decided the person in front of her has thought it through.
“Okay,” she says.
The one word, and everything underneath it—the worry, the love, the faith of a woman who has been watching her little sister make decisions for thirty-two years and has learned, somewhere along the way, to trust them.
“Okay?” I say.
“You’ve always known what you were doing,” she says. “Even when it looked like you didn’t. Even when I thought you didn’t.” A pause. “Go open your bookshop, Norah. Go build your thing. Just—call me when you get there.”
My chest opens.
“I will,” I say. “I promise.”
“And tell that man of yours that I expect an introduction the next time you’re in Larkin.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“Good.” Another pause. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
She hangs up first, and I sit with my cellphone in my lap, the hospital hushed around me.
Outside the window, the sky has gone the blue-gray of early evening, the kind that arrives before dark. Low sounds move around me—footsteps in the corridor, voices at the nurse’s station, the steady distant sound of equipment in the background.
I think about Penny at her kitchen table, the smell of cinnamon and fresh coffee in the air.
She’ll call her best friend, Marie, now, and tell her about my decision—how proud she is, even though she’s still trying to understand my logic.
She’ll make a list—Penny always makes a list—of things she’s going to say to me the next time she sees me, and some of them will be pointed and some of them will be kind and all of them will come from the same place.
Years of watching me do exactly what I intended to do and not always being sure she should let me.
She always lets me.
That’s the part I can’t thank her enough for.
I lean back against the pillow, look at the ceiling and think about a road three hundred miles long and a town at the end.
Down the hall at the vending machines, there is a man who has been here for three days.
He needs to tell me something, and I plan to let him say it when we’re both capable of hearing it properly.
We haven’t finished driving down that road.
We will.
Everything else is waiting.
The End