“Think I didn’t hear you in here, telling yourself those silly stories, girl?” she asked, her words overpronounced and scornful.
I didn’t answer. Only stared at the remnants of my wolf carvings on the floor.
“When are you going to realize that none of these wolves will ever want you for real like that?” she asked above me. “If they come sniffing, it is only because they smell your desperation and know my idiot daughter will defy everything I’ve taught her to open her legs for any daft boy who looks at her twice.”
Anywhere but here.
I kept my eyes on the floor, knowing she didn’t want answers—only obedience.
“Stand up!” she commanded.
I climbed to my feet.
And we stood in silence, her gaze pressing down on me like a blanket made of lead. She was more than half a foot shorter, but somehow, she always loomed over me.
“You hungry?” she asked after several moments of watching me stare at the wood splinters on the floor.
Am I?
I hadn’t eaten in… I didn’t know how long. But the moment she said the word, hunger came rushing in like a flood, along with the need to pee. My bladder filled in an instant, and my stomach let out a low, embarrassing growl.
“Alright, then. Go shower.” My mother sucked her teeth and waved me toward the door. “I’ll have something ready when you get out.”
True to her word, there was a steaming bowl waiting for me after my cold shower—sweet cornmeal porridge, thick and golden, with extra condensed milk and a dash of nutmeg. My favorite. She must’ve felt guilty. Cooking comfort food was the only version of an apology you’d get from Claudine Ellis.
I sat at our little wooden table—the one Naomi’s father had gifted to us when I was small. As I ate, I glanced up at the handwritten devotional calendar on the wall above the cupboard. She made them every Advent for the next year, spending all four weeks painstakingly choosing and writing out the verses.
Today’s devotion:Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.Proverbs 22:6
The date underneath it made my stomach twist.
Nearly four full moon cycles had passed. I’d been locked in my room for an entire season. Spring was over, and summer had begun.
The longest punishment she’d ever given me. Because, in her mind, having sex with a boy—actually daring to hope for another life—was the worst thing I’d ever done.
“This world is cruel, Sadie.”As if reading my thoughts, Mama sat down on the other side of the table with her own bowl of corn porridge. “It’ll eat an idiot girl like you alive. I am only trying to protect you—even from yourself. Them wolves—marriage and babies—like I told you, that is not your path.”
She had told me that. Over and over.
Since the moment I started to change, she’d made it clear: I was not for love. I was not for wanting. I would serve, like she had served. I would learn her ways, become a woman of the same purpose, and not stray from her path. Ever.
“Girl, eat,” she said, tapping the counter. “Don’t dilly-dally. I only let you out because I need you to help me jar these summer vegetables before they go to rot.”
I nodded and ate faster. Then I helped, slicing and jarring up the wooden boxes of corn, green beans, and young carrots we’d received as our portion of the community crop, while my mother cooked down the spinach and kale.
“There’s another community meeting tomorrow about the Bridal Exchange. Don’t get me started on that foolishness,” shemuttered as she stirred the greens in a large steel pot. “How ridiculous is it that all these parents are letting their girls break the Ordnung and fly across the sea to that heathen Hamilton girl’s kingdom?”
That heathen Hamilton girl was what Mama called Naomi’s second-oldest sister—the one who’d run away from the village and somehow returned a decade later with a wolf king as her mate and a kingdom full of eligible males looking for mates.
“The nerve of her,” my mother muttered as she ladled the greens into a jar with a slotted spoon.
I made the proper sounds. Tsked in all the right places. But my fingers compulsively kept dipping into my apron pocket, rubbing a thumb over the orphaned baby wolf.
Eventually, the day ended.
And I left the door to my room open, as I always did after a punishment.
But I lay awake long after the house went quiet, thinking,Anywhere but here.
