“You mean, you’ll feel like a failure if you admit that you need a rest?”
I hang my head. I should have known she’d see right through me. “Something like that.”
“This all goes back to that awful thing my son did. I wish I could wring his neck.” She gives a heavy sigh. “I think you know what you have to do, Sam.”
I nod because I do. I have to walk in there and quit despite how scary it feels. “I know.”
“And not just for your pack—foryourself. You deserve to be relaxed and happy. You’ll still be able to volunteer and do yourcharity work, you just won’t have to think about bullshit while you’re doing it.”
“Yeah, it’s for the best,” I agree. “And I need to be at home more. My pack… Nana, my pack and I met someone. Someone we really like.”
There’s a sound of joy and I can imagine her smiling. “This someone… have you let them in, yet?”
I smile at her use of neutral pronouns. “She’s slowly but surely breaking through my walls, yes,” I reply. “She makes our pack feel a little less broken.”
“She sounds like a keeper.”
“But I don’t know how to accept it. Things feel so scary. My friends don’t know what’s going on with me either. The stress makes me unrecognizable, I guess.”
“You’ve been keeping it all locked up again, haven’t you, Sam?” she asks, and the concern in her voice is what makes me crack. “Your friends deserve to know who you are. Kit didn’t look at you any differently, did he?”
I nod but realize she can’t see me. “No, but he’s my scent match. It was easier to tell him about it.”
“The thing that happened to you isn’t something you can forget. We’ve been over this. You have to accept that it affected you.”
“But, it’s so small in comparison. Just an unfortunate blip. Less than two percent of my life.”
“And it’s the most important two percent, because now you have this compulsive drive. It’s one of the best and worst things about you, my dear, because you have the power to take care of the people around you, but you won’t let anyone take care ofyou.”
“It’s not that bad,” I say, but the firm is in my periphery, and I realize that I was about to continue working in a horrible environment just so I could prove I could do it.
“Sam, you used to deep clean the house every other week growing up. And we had maids who cleaned every day.”
“Nana—”
“No. Sam, you’d accidentally clean it so much that the paint would come off, and then you’d go get paint to repaint it. You developed a compulsion. Are you cleaning your own house like that nowadays?”
I purse my lips. “I’m not really home enough to do that.”
“See, that’s what I mean,” she strikes, firm and final. “You have to criticize yourself. Instead of being proud that you no longer clean compulsively, you attack something else about yourself.”
“I just—” I shake my head, not being able to accept it. “I want to have been worth it.”
“Worth what, Sammy?”
“You took me in,” I say as my voice cracks. “You were done with raising children, but you took me in, rather than leaving me in that place.”
My grandma makes a cooing noise, like she wants to comfort me from here. “Yes, I did. And I would do it again. You are everything to me.”
But would I have been everything if I didn’t try so hard? Would I have been worth it if I didn’t try to make something of myself? Channel my alpha into something productive? All these thoughts whirl in my head, and I can’t comb through them because of the emotion in my chest.
I must be silent for too long, because my grandma continues. “Your parents are, excuse my French, littleshitheads.” I cough up a wet laugh. “Your grandfather was all about that toxic alpha indoctrination. I didn’t realize how much it affected your father until it was too late. And if your grandfather had been alive, he wouldn’t have allowed me to take you in, but you know what I would have done?”
“What?”
“Dumped his ass.” She makes a tutting noise. “Divorced, right away. Right after I had gotten you out of there.”
The second the words are out there, I lose the last bit of control I have. My emotions that were wrangled up in a tight bow come unraveled, and a tiny sob escapes my throat.
