The entry is undated. The handwriting is looser than the others, as if her hand was shaking.
I told Chris I was struggling. He held me and said he’d fix it. He didn’t fix it. He couldn’t. The structure doesn’t bend. The pack needs what the pack needs, and what the pack needs from the Alpha’s mate is everything.
I love him. I love him so much it makes my chest hurt. But love is not the same as enough, and I’m running out of enough.
I put the journal down. I push my chair back from the table. I walk outside and stand on the porch and breathe cold air until the burning in my eyes stops.
Sixteen years I’ve been angry at my father for what happened to her. Sixteen years I’ve carried the imageof a woman who smiled through her own erosion while the pack took everything she had. I built my rebellion on that image. I built my refusal on it. Every time my father asked me to step up, to engage, to take my place, I threw her memory at him like a shield.
What the journal shows me is worse than the image and better than it. Worse because she named it. She saw it happening and wrote it down and couldn’t stop it. Better because she wasn’t passive. She fought. She told my father she was struggling. She asked for help. The help wasn’t enough, not because he didn’t try, but because the structure he’d inherited from his father didn’t have room for what she needed.
The structure.
Not the man. Not the bond. Not the love. The structure. The rigid hierarchy of obligation and expectation that treated the Alpha’s mate as a role rather than a person.
My father failed her. He knows it. I know it. But the journal shows me something I hadn’t considered: he failed her within a system he didn’t build and didn’t know how to change. His father’s pack. His father’s rules. The same inheritance of expectation that I’ve been running from for a decade.
I go back inside. Sit down. Open the journal to the last entries.
She writes about me. Pages and pages about me.My first words, my first steps, the time I tried to shift at four years old and ended up as something she describes as “half boy, half angry otter.” She writes about my stubbornness, my refusal to be told what to do, the way I challenged every rule before I understood what rules were for.
He’s like me. Not like Chris, though he looks like Chris. Like me. The part of me that walked into Mistwood with a suitcase and a teaching certificate and no idea what she was getting into. The part that doesn’t bend.
I hope he doesn’t bend. I hope he fights every battle I didn’t fight. I hope he breaks every structure I couldn’t break. And I hope, when he finds the person who makes his wolf go still, he builds something new. Not what Chris and I had. Not what Chris’s parents had. Something that doesn’t require anyone to disappear.
The last entry is dated three weeks before she died.
Roan asked me today why I tell him stories about Edinburgh. I said because I want him to know there was a version of me that existed before this. He looked at me with those serious dark eyes and said, “But this version is the one I know.”
He’s right. This is the version he knows. And this version loves him more than any version of me has ever loved anything.
Whatever happens, he should know that.
I close the journal. I sit at the table in my cabin and I cry. Not the quiet, controlled grief I’ve allowed myself over the years. The ugly kind. The kind that shakes your ribs and makes your face wet and sounds like an animal in pain. I cry for my mother and for the woman she was before Mistwood and for the woman she became and for the son she loved and couldn’t protect from the structure that consumed her.
And then I stop. I wash my face. I make more tea. I sit down with the journal and I read it again, from the beginning, and this time I read it not as her son but as a man who is building exactly the thing she hoped I’d build.
Something new.
My phone is on the table. I pick it up. Call my father.
He answers on the first ring. “Did you read it?”
“I read it.”
Silence. Not the weighted, tactical silence of the Alpha. The held breath of a man waiting to hear what his son thinks of the woman they both lost.
“She was extraordinary,” I say.
“Yes.” His voice is rough. “She was.”
“I want to do the claiming. The full ceremony, the clearing, the pack witness. I want Phoebe to have what Mum had without paying what Mum paid. I want to build the thing Mum wrote about. The new thing.”
He’s quiet for a long time. When he speaks, his voice is steady, but the steadiness is hard-won.
“Tell me what you need.”
“The clearing. Lanterns. You, Rebecca, Tom, Maggie. Nell.” I pause. “Keep it small. Keep it real. No politics. No positioning. Just people who matter.”
