From the far side of the shop, Declan's voice: "What size?"
I look at Finn.
Finn looks at me.
"He's asking about the underwear," Finn says helpfully.
"I know what he's asking about."
"Are you going to answer?"
"I'm thinking about whether this is my life now."
"Is it a bad life?"
I look at the dress in the mirror. At the afternoon light coming through the shop window and the yellow layers catching it. At Rowan near the register now, efficiently directing the shop owner through what sounds like a comprehensive selection of nightwear with the same composure he applies to financial assessments. At Declan holding up two options near the far wall, waiting.
"Small," I call.
A pause.
"Right," Declan says.
Finn makes a sound next to me that is definitely a suppressed laugh.
"Don't," I tell him.
"I'm not saying anything."
"Your face is saying everything."
"My face is completely neutral."
It is, in fact, absolutely not neutral.
I look at the mirror again while Finn eventually composes himself and Declan adds selections to the growing pile at the register and Rowan gives the shop owner the Cadillac's plate number so the bags can be brought out in order. The shop has the particular unhurried warmth of a business that knows exactly what it is and has stopped trying to be anything else—the pressed-fabric smell, the lavender sachets, the spring inventory arranged by color in a way that someone with genuine aesthetic investment organized.
My scent is the warmest it's been since before the apartment.
The lime zest is present and the honey is fully back and the vanilla has that particular depth it reaches when my body is genuinely at ease rather than managing a situation. I smell like myself—the actual version, the one that existed before fourteen months of collectors and debt and choosing utilitarian clothing and rationing dessert and sleeping in three-hour increments.
I stand in a white-and-yellow dress in a small-town shop on the afternoon of the day after the worst night I can immediately remember, and the three scents of the O'Calloway Pack move through the space around me with the comfortable, settled quality of something that has been here long enough to belong.
Twenty days.
The registry appointment is this afternoon. The temporary bond papers that were filed electronically last night become physical documentation this afternoon. After today, the provisional pack status is real in every way the law cares about—recorded, recognized, operational.
After today, whatever the collectors do next, they'll be doing it to a pack Omega.
Twenty days.
The shop owner emerges from the back with a stack of bags, bright-eyed and efficient, delivering them to Rowan with the satisfaction of someone whose inventory has been acquired by people who understood what they were looking at. Declan adds his selections to the pile. Finn finds the wedge sandals in two more colorways and adds those without discussion.
I watch all of this.
I watch a pack move through a small shop on a Sunday afternoon, making decisions about what I need with the same unhurried competence they've applied to everything since a road in the rain last night, and the thing that keeps catching me is the absence—the specific absence of the transactional energy that characterized every interaction in my previous pack.
Nobody is keeping a running total. Nobody is calculating what this will cost me. The shop owner is practically glowing at them and they're just—handling things.
