20
Elise
I have been simmering on this thought nonstop.
Shawn lied to me. Shawnfuckinglied to me. We lived together for two years, and I never put two and two together. I feel so stupid.
It’s been a quiet day; guests will start arriving tomorrow. People have been in and out, decorating the place. I’ve been staying in the kitchen at the Hayes House pretty much entirely, trying to keep my hands busy.
If I keep working, maybe I won’t have time to think about anything. I won’t have to confront what I saw—the wolf, the transformation, Shawn standing out in the morning mist.
Maybe I could convince myself that it was a trick of the light, the way the dawn was scattered through all the trees, but the feeling of his claws on my skin, careful and precise, made me sure of what I had seen.
It cast all the dreams I’ve been having in a new light. A startlingly clear light. The full moon coming out from behind a heavy cloud and lighting up the night kind of clear.
The last of the preparations for the wedding are coming together, and everything that was just recipes and massive grocery shopping trips are suddenly food prep and an endless number of dishes to be washed and dirtied again.
For maybe the tenth time today, Aiden pops his head in the kitchen and raises his eyebrows at the batter I’m stirring and asks, “Can I have a taste? What if I use a clean spoon this time?”
“Logan, can you deal with your brother?” I huff, sidestepping one brother to call out to the other. Logan’s made himself pretty damn scarce lately, and I’ve taken to just demanding his time out loud in any direction. Eventually he shows up.
“She said we could taste test the first batch,” Aiden says before I can ask Logan to cart this annoyance out of here.
“I did not,” I snap, and catch myself. I’m getting way too prickly, and they don’t deserve it from me. We’re all stressed.
I pause and take a breath, pinching above the bridge of my nose like it’ll do anything to relieve the pressure mounting behind my eyes. Logan and Aiden watch, waiting for my next direction.
“You can each have one only, but only if you clean those trays first. I need them to start baking the next batch.”
That will get them out of my hair for a moment.
Despite the whirl of people coming and going, working in the kitchen feels both overwhelmed by company and desperately alone. I need someone to talk to about what I saw the other morning, but I can’t.
The Hayes brothers bicker over who washes and who dries the trays as I add the final few cups of flour to the batter and start to stir again.
And like all the other moments I’m not currently multiplying measurements, suddenly I have all the time to think.
For the last day or so, I have been struggling to keep my cool. Whatever appearance of calm I manage externally is out of sheer catatonic shock. How can it both be that there are really werewolves, and that the one that’s been showing up everywhere is my ex-husband?
Even when I talked to him in the boutique, it didn’t seem real enough. He was just Shawn. He looked the same as he always did. It didn’t seem real that he could be something else, perhaps even something truly dangerous.
I wanted to make sure I knew, that my brain hadn’t just malfunctioned that morning. Lack of sleep making me see things, maybe, I thought. Nope. I downloaded one of those sleep monitoring apps and propped it up against the window, recording the edge of the woods in the early hours of morning, and I’d seen it again.
If Shawn’s always been this kind of creature, was he telling the truth to his brothers?
Shit, his brothers. I hadn’t even thought about how they were a part of this. Are they all wolves?
All the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I stop stirring the batter. Slowly, I lift my eyes to the two brothers chatting in front of me.
Aiden is rambling, “...I could never move to a bigger town, man. It’s getting crowded enough with all the wedding guests coming here, I could barely find any parking this morning. And then Mom snapped at me for leaving out that newspaper talking about the wolf sightings—”
Logan rolls his eyes and sighs and flicks him with the damp dishtowel.
“I mean, coyote sightings,” Aiden corrects himself awkwardly. They both pause and glance at me, a moment more telling than anything else they’ve said.
Oh. My. God. They’re all werewolves.
If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, would I have even connected the dots? Or would their terrible attempts at keeping this a secret continue to fly over my head?
