Malcolm stays at the window for a long time.
"He's going to try to stay gone," he says finally. Not to anyone in particular. Just to the window. To the empty driveway. "You know that, right. He's going to decide this is noble and dig in."
"Yes," Finn says from the stove.
"We're not letting him."
"No," Finn agrees.
"I don't care how long it takes. I don't care what we have to do." Malcolm turns from the window. His face has hardened into the lines of someone who has made an irrevocable choice. "We're not a pack without him. We're just people who live in the same house."
Nobody argues with that.
Because nobody disagrees.
Finn puts food on the table. We eat. It tastes like nothing but we eat it anyway because Finn made it and Finn making it means something.
After, I wash the dishes. Rhys dries them without being asked, passing the plates to Finn who puts them away, and Malcolm sits at the table with his phone and calls Alex one more time.
Voicemail.
"It's me," he says. His voice has gone quiet. The loud has burned off and what's underneath is just Malcolm, unarmored, talking to his pack lead who isn't there. "We're okay. Vee's okay. Rhys is okay. Finn is—Finn is Finn." A pause. "We're going to come get you. I want you to know that. Whatever you think you did, whatever you think this solves—" He stops. Starts again. "Just…. answer your phone, Alex. That's all I'm asking right now. Just answer your damn phone. We love you man."
He hangs up.
The kitchen is quiet.
Outside the window the last of the light is going. The driveway is still empty.
We stay together in the kitchen until it's fully dark, none of us quite willing to be the first one to go to bed. Like going to bed means accepting the night. Means accepting that Alex is in a motel forty minutes away in the dark and we're here without him.
Eventually Finn turns off the kitchen light and we go upstairs.
We pile into my room like we have been—Rhys on one side, Malcolm on the other, Finn on the floor without being asked.
The space where Alex would be is just empty.
Nobody says anything about it.
We don't sleep for a long time.
But we stay together.
Chapter 38
Vee
I wake up surrounded.
Malcolm on my left, one arm heavy across my waist. Rhys on my right, his warmth a wall. Finn curled up at the foot of the bed, already awake by the sound of his breathing, just lying there. The nest is complete around us—every shirt, every scent, the smell of pack that I've been building without quite deciding to.
Except one.
The empty space on the other side of Malcolm where Alex would be.
I stare at the ceiling and let myself feel it. The wrongness of it. The negative space where someone should be.
Then I get up.
