“Everyone’s stable,” I say. “Jamie needs watching overnight, but the prognosis is good. Lewis and Jack will be fine in a day or two. The others are minor.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. I chose to come.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then: “You did.”
We walk home through the dark village, my kit over one shoulder and Roan’s hand in mine. The high street is empty, the pub dark, the houses shut up tight against the November cold. Our footsteps fall into thesame rhythm they always do, and neither of us speaks, and the silence between us is full rather than empty.
I chose to come to Mistwood. I chose to treat the wolf in the forest. I chose to open the door when Roan knocked. I chose him. Tonight I chose his pack. Every choice has led me further from the quiet, uncomplicated life I thought I wanted. Closer to something louder, messier, infinitely more meaningful.
The cottage is cold when we get back. The nest is still in the living room, blankets piled in the corner. The sight of it does something to my throat I wasn’t expecting. I built that. My body built that, driven by instincts I didn’t understand, and it kept me safe while the world shifted around me.
Roan locks the door. I put the kettle on. We move around each other in the small kitchen with the unconscious coordination of two people who’ve learned each other’s rhythms, and neither of us speaks until we’re sitting at the table with tea between us.
“Your father called me Phoebe,” I say.
“I noticed.”
“Not Dr Clarke. Not ‘the vet.’ Phoebe.”
Roan wraps his hands around his mug, and something crosses his face. Not the old resistance, the flinch I used to see whenever pack and personal life intersected. Something softer.
“He liked you,” he says. “He liked watching youwork.” He pauses. “He said you reminded him of someone.”
He doesn’t say who. He doesn’t need to. I reach across the table and take his hand. Outside, the village is quiet. Sleeping. Inside, two people who never planned for any of this sit at a kitchen table, drink tea, hold hands. Nothing else needs saying.
Chapter 32
What She Left Behind
Roan
My father bringsthe journal on a Thursday afternoon, four days after the fight.
He doesn’t announce himself. No phone call, no knock. I come home from checking on Lewis, whose foreleg is healing well but who is milking the injury for all the sympathy it’s worth, and the journal is sitting on my kitchen table. A4, hardback, dark green cloth cover worn soft at the corners. A folded note on top in my father’s handwriting.
She would have wanted you to have this. Take your time. Dad
I stand in my kitchen and look at it for a long time.
The cover is water-stained in one corner. The spine is cracked from use, the pages swollen slightlywith age. My mother’s handwriting is visible along the edge where the book falls open naturally, a page she returned to often enough to break the binding. I don’t read it. Not yet. I put the kettle on and make tea and sit down and wrap my hands around the mug and look at the journal the way you look at a door you’ve been standing in front of for twenty years.
Then I open it.
Her handwriting is smaller than I remember. Neat, precise, with a slight backward slant that my primary school teacher would have called distinctive. The first entry is dated nineteen years before I was born.
Arrived in Mistwood today. The cottage is smaller than advertised but the light is extraordinary. Mountains on three sides. A forest that looks like it was here before anything else. The school is a single room attached to the church hall, and the headmistress is a woman called Agnes who appears to run the village through sheer force of personality. I like her already.
The village itself is strange. I can’t put my finger on it. Everyone is friendly, genuinely so, but there’s something underneath the friendliness. A carefulness. As if every conversation is happening on two levels and I can only hear one of them.
I set the mug down. My throat has closed.
She wrote the way she talked. Direct, warm, observant. The voice on the page is so completely hers thatfor a moment I’m twelve again, sitting at the kitchen table while she tells me about her day, and the loss of her is so sharp and so present that I have to close the book and press my palms against my eyes.
I breathe. I count. The grief isn’t new. The grief has been with me for sixteen years, packed tight and filed under things I don’t look at. But this is different. This isn’t memory, which fades and distorts and eventually becomes a story you tell yourself about a person you loved. This is her voice, preserved in ink, unmediated by time.
I open the book again.
