* Half a year later *
The border patrol report says nothing worth reading and I have read the same line about a drainage ditch six times. My hands abandoned the report twenty minutes ago—moved to the fishing flies on the porch table, wrapping thread around hooks with a focus that used to calm me down.
The Adler correspondence sits at my elbow, unopened. They have graduated from polite requests to veiled threats that sound like compliments if you don't read carefully. I have been handling them for months without breathing a word to Nell, which makes me either protective or a coward.
Footsteps on the path. I know who it is before she clears the tree line, and the fact that I have memorized her footfall is something I will be examining never.
"Both down?" I keep my eyes on the fly I am butchering, pouring every ounce of composure into the performance of a man unbothered.
"Rowan went easy." She sets her knitting basket on the porch rail and pushes hair behind her ear. "Ash fought sleep like it owed him money. Sable's on watch."
She leans against the railing and nods at the empty chair beside me, basket balanced against her hip. "Can I sit?"
I gesture without looking up because looking up seems medically inadvisable. She hesitates—half a second, the same pause she always takes when we are alone, measuring whether staying is safe. Then she sits, and the porch gets smaller.
"Fishing flies." She leans forward, studying the row of feathered hooks spread across the table. "Going out tomorrow?"
"Maybe. If the weather holds." I finish a wrap that looks like something a child made and quietly slide it out of her sightline.
"You know the whole compound talks about your fish." She pulls yarn from her basket, needles starting that quick rhythm I could watch for hours—a thought I am generously choosing to ignore. "Maren says you cook better than the pack kitchen and refuse to admit it."
"The fish does the work. I just show up with a pan." My thumb runs along the hook's bend. "Maren overshares on a schedule."
"She says that about you, actually." Her mouth curves, the lamplight catches it, and my hands stop on the thread. "She says you ‘decide with your gut and send your brain to draft the justification’. Sounds like a rehearsed line, if you ask me."
"Maren has never had an unexpressed thought in her life." I set the fly down because I have wrapped the same section three times. "She would've made a terrifying Alpha."
Nell laughs—short, warm, real. Eighteen months ago she didn't laugh in front of anyone but Sable. The distance between that woman and the one knitting a child-sized hat beside me is something I track the way I track seasons—not by watching, but by noticing one morning that everything is different.
"Jory asked me to teach his daughter." Her needles click in steady rhythm. "The knitting workshop. A year ago I couldn't have imagined speaking loud enough for the back row to hear."
"You're not the same person who showed up at my gate." The words come out before the diplomatic part of my brain submits a motion to rephrase.
Her hands slow. The needles pause mid-stitch, and she stares at the yarn in her lap long enough that I come up with several apologies.
"I don't know when it happened." Her voice drops to the register she uses when she is being honest instead of polite. "It wasn't one moment—like my voice got a little louder each week and by the time I noticed, I was already someone different."
She looks toward the compound beyond the porch rail, and her chin lifts a fraction. "Blackvale did that."
"Blackvale didn't do anything." I hold her gaze when it comes back to me, and something shifts behind my ribs that I don't have vocabulary for. "You did."
The silence that follows could power a small generator. She looks down at her knitting and I look at the fishing fly I have been pretending to tie.
Between our chairs, Ash—the wolf, not her son, though the naming situation still catches in my throat—lies with his head on his paws. Perfectly content to exist in the exact centre of the space between us.
"This birthday Maren keeps threatening." She picks her needles back up, voice lighter, redirecting us to safer ground. "Any chance of talking her down?"
"I have tried. Maren is immune to reason and allergic to scale." I lean back in my chair. "She wants lanterns, musicians, the full production."
"I wanted to eat a fish by the lake and go to bed, just like last year." I gesture toward the dark tree line. "That was my entire birthday plan."
"Sable baked a practice cake." Her mouth does that thing again—the curve that rewires something behind my sternum. "The kitchen hasn't recovered. She wants it to be perfect."
The way she says it carries a weight that presses against every conversation we have had on this porch. I know about Sable—have known from the beginning, the way you know a door is open before you look.
Sable is brave and warm and the chemistry between us is a room with no furniture. I can admire the architecture but I have no desire to live there.
Nell knows that I know. She has built a wall between us because of it—invisible, meticulous, reinforced every time the conversation drifts too warm.
The way she never stays on this porch longer than she has decided is reasonable. The way she is already winding yarn, gathering the basket, making the motions of leaving like she has overstayed something.
I don't stop her. I never do, and the reasons I give myself for it change depending on the hour.
"Goodnight, Oren." She stands with the basket on her arm, and the warmth beside me leaves with her.
"Goodnight." The word tastes like less than I mean, and I let it go anyway because the alternative is worse.
Three steps off the porch, and she stops. Turns back. The lamplight catches her face at an angle that is going to cost me sleep.
"Thank you." Not for tonight—I hear it in the way she holds the words before releasing them. "For letting us stay. For not asking questions I wasn't ready to answer."
"For the cabin, the workshop." Her voice is steady but her eyes are doing something she cannot control. "For the pack treating my boys like they belong."
I hold her gaze because looking away right now would be a lie I am not willing to tell. "You don't need to thank me." Rougher than planned, lower, and my hands close at my sides.
She nods. Turns. Walks back toward her cabin with the basket on her arm, and the porch gets larger and emptier in exact proportion to her distance.
Ash lifts his head and watches her disappear, then turns to me with an expression I refuse to anthropomorphize but that reads unmistakably as you're an idiot. I scratch behind his ear and he huffs and drops his chin to his paws.
The Adler letter sits where I left it. I crack the seal—formal stationery, careful script, the kind of language packs use when they are being polite about something that isn't polite at all.
A representative will attend the Blackvale birthday celebration as a gesture of goodwill between packs. The name at the bottom is Rhys Adler. My hand goes still on the paper, and below me Ash's ears flatten against his skull.