“Against protocol. Not illegally. There’s no pack law that says I can’t run beyond the boundary. There’s a protocol that says patrols should be logged with the Beta, and I should have done that. I didn’t. I’m doing it now.”
The silence stretches. I wait for the lecture. The familiar recitation of responsibility, duty, the weight of the Mistwood name. The inevitable pivot to succession planning, to the role I’m supposed to fill, to the future my father has been holding open for me like a door I refuse to walk through.
It doesn’t come.
“I’ll give you Lewis, Jack, and two from theyounger rotation,” he says. “Pick them yourself. Brief Rebecca on the schedule so she can integrate it with the existing patrols.”
I blink. “That’s it?”
“What were you expecting?”
“I was expecting you to make this about something it isn’t.”
He wraps his hands around his mug. The gesture is so like mine that I have to look away. “You came here. Sat at this table. Presented a tactical plan that addresses a genuine threat and asked for resources to execute it. That’s not a conversation about succession, Roan. That’s a conversation about keeping people safe.”
“Right.”
“Though if you wanted to talk about succession?—”
“Don’t push it.”
He smiles. It’s brief and genuine. “Noted.”
I finish my tea and stand up. He walks me to the door the way he always does, as if I’m a guest rather than his son, and the formality of it used to irritate me and now just makes me tired. Not the bad kind of tired. The kind that comes after you’ve been carrying something heavy and you’ve set it down, and your arms ache from the absence of the weight.
“Roan.”
I stop on the path. Turn back.
“Your mother kept a journal,” he says. He’s standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, and the morning light behind him makes it hard to read his face. “Did you know that?”
“No.”
“She wrote about everything. The village. The pack. You, mostly. She wrote about you constantly.” He pauses. “I found it after she died. Read it once. Put it away. I wasn’t ready for what was in it.”
My chest tightens. “Dad?—”
“I think you should have it. When you’re ready. There are things in there about what she went through, the emergence, the bond, the early years. Things that might help Phoebe. Things I couldn’t give her because I didn’t understand them.” He clears his throat. “I’ll bring it to you. No rush.”
He goes inside before I can respond. The door closes. I stand on the path with the morning cold against my face and my throat full of something I don’t have words for.
My mother’s journal. Her voice, preserved on paper, twenty years after I last heard it in person. The thought is so vast that I can’t look at it directly. I have to approach it sideways, the way you approach a wound that’s too raw to touch.
I walk to Phoebe’s.
The route takes me through the village, past TheWren where Nell is setting out the sandwich board for the day. She catches my eye through the window and gives me a small wave. Past the post office where Mrs Hartwell is already arguing with the postman about something that is almost certainly not worth arguing about. Past the shop where Helen is arranging apples in the window display with a precision that suggests she’s avoiding going home.
These people. My people. For years I’ve been moving through this village like a man passing through a train station, present but not stopping. Now I notice them the way Phoebe notices things: with attention. With the specific, quiet awareness of someone who understands that paying attention is its own form of care.
Phoebe is in her surgery when I arrive. I let myself in through the back door, which she leaves unlocked during the day despite my objections, and find her at the examination table with a rabbit.
The rabbit is enormous. It’s the size of a small dog, with black-and-white fur and an expression of absolute calm that suggests it has seen worse than a veterinary examination and survived. Phoebe is listening to its heartbeat with a stethoscope and frowning.
“Problem?” I ask from the doorway.
“This rabbit has a resting heart rate of a hundred and thirty.”
“Is that unusual?”
