“I know.”
“She doesn’t want to see me.”
“Probably not.”
He didn’t continue afterward, and then he stood. At the door he stopped, hand on the frame.
“You’re sitting in the dark at 3 am with your phone dead. I’ve been running your council meetings for two weeks. You missed a territory dispute yesterday that three families are furious about.” He looked at me over his shoulder. “I’m not going to tell you what to do. But think about what you actually want. Not whatyour mother wants, not what Lorraine wants, not what the pack expects. What you want.”
He left. The hallway went quiet.
I sat in the dark. The screen had gone to sleep, the room lit only by the crack of light from the corridor.
Name one person who respects her.
I couldn’t. I ran through the pack in my head, family by family, Alpha by Alpha. The Webbers tolerated her. The border families ignored her. The council elders were polite to her face because of her family name, but behind closed doors I’d heard the way they talked about her, the eye rolls, the careful silences when her name came up. She’d been telling people she was Luna for months and not a single person had treated her like one. They treated her like a woman with a title she hadn’t earned, wearing a crown nobody put on her head.
I thought about Andrea. Andrea at the shelter, kneeling on a dirty floor, hand-feeding a traumatized dog. Andrea at my desk, pushing back on my decisions with a confidence that had nothing to do with rank or status. Andrea on the porch, reading to a wolf she didn’t know was a king, treating him exactly the same as she treated everyone: with kindness, with honesty, without fear.
What do you actually want?
I opened the top drawer of my desk. Under a stack of papers, there was a pink Post-It note. Small, square, Andrea’s handwriting.
Third cup. Don’t push it.
She’d stuck it on my coffee mug the morning after three days of ice, the first crack in the wall she’d put up after she found out about the shift. The first sign that she was coming back to me.
I peeled it off the mug that morning and put it in this drawer. Never threw it away.
I took it out. The paper was soft from handling, the edges curled. Her handwriting was neat, the i’s dotted with circles. I ran my thumb over the ink.
Luca’s voice in my head:what do you actually want?
I pressed the Post-It against my chest and closed my eyes. The paper was warm against my shirt, small enough to fit under my palm, and I held it there the way I used to hold her hand, tight, desperate, like the thing I was holding was the only proof that what we had was real.
I was still sitting like that when the sun came up.
28
— • —
Andrea
I woke up at six, made it to the bathroom, threw up, brushed my teeth, threw up again. Sat on the tile with my back against the tub until my stomach settled enough to stand. By the time I got downstairs, Grandma had ginger tea and dry toast waiting on the table.
“Drink it slow,” she said from the stove where she was making herself eggs I couldn’t even look at without gagging. “Small sips.”
“I know, Grandma.”
“And eat the toast. The whole piece, not three bites and then pushing it around like you think I won’t notice.”
“I eat the toast.”
“You eat half the toast and feed the rest to the squirrels when you go on your walk. I’ve seen you.”
I took the tea and sipped it. My stomach rolled but held. Grandma cracked an egg into the pan and the smell hit me so hard I had to turn my head toward the window. The jasmine bush outside was blooming, which used to be my favorite smell in this house and now made me gag. Between the eggs and the jasmine I was trapped, breathing through my mouth, gripping the warm mug with both hands.
“Your mother was the same with you,” Grandma said, sitting down across from me. “First trimester she couldn’t keep anything down. Ginger tea, dry crackers, flat ginger ale. That was all she ate for three months. Your father used to make her smoothies and she’d take one sip and throw them at him.”
