Chapter 64

The dusk had just finished settling into night when my phone buzzed against my blanket. I finished pulling on a new sweater and reached for it, seeing Ethan's name glowing on the screen. Instantly, my body responded. My pulse jumped, my breath caught, and something warm and exhilarating unfurled in my stomach.

I opened the message.

Tonight I have to put on a show for my father and the pack. But tomorrow... fourth period, same place?

And underneath text, like an afterthought, a little heart emoji.

I stopped breathing, grinning like an idiot as I typed I'll be there , with a little heart too.

I had barely hit send when a knock came at my bedroom door. Every muscle in me locked. I shoved the phone face down under the blanket so fast I nearly dropped it.

"Yeah?" I called, and my voice came out a little too high.

The door opened. Dad stood there.

For a moment I only looked at him. Even now, after days of having him back inside the house, part of me still hadn't quite caught up. Some part of my brain kept expecting the barn, the chains, the wrongness behind wood and shadow. It still felt a little like waking inside someone else's life and being told it was mine. But there he was, in the doorway of my room. Human. Real.

His hair was shorter now, though not perfectly even, which meant Elise had probably done her best while he did his best not to fidget and lose patience with the whole humiliating business. Now he looked less like something dragged out of a garbage bin and more like a person. And yet none of that made him harmless. That truth lived under everything now.

It was there in the way I had watched him over the past days while pretending not to. In the way Hailey launched herself at him with all the blunt force of a five-year-old who had lost too much time and meant to make up for it in one body check. In the way he would go rigid for half a breath when she came at him from behind or dropped into his lap without warning, the strain passing visibly through his face before he mastered it. At first those moments had made my stomach drop. Now they still did, just less violently. Because each day the strain was smaller, less obvious, less like a thing dragging him apart and more like something he was learning to pin back with bare hands.

He was getting stronger. Or maybe more himself. Maybe both. I had noticed, and because I had noticed, I had kept my distance. That was why I had let Hailey have all the clinging and all the laughter while I kept to the sidelines and gave him space. Because I understood he needed the room to come toward me himself if he was going to come at all.

Now he had. He stood there with one hand resting lightly against the doorframe. His eyes moved over me with care.

"Hi, pup." His voice sounded like him again, not like words dragged through thorns. He hesitated for half a second, his gaze flicking to the bed, to the folded blanket, back to my face. "I was wondering if you might let me steal a little of your time." A faint, almost sheepish breath escaped him. "It's been a while."

"Yeah," I said quickly. "Of course."

He stepped inside and closed the door behind him with gentle care. I nudged the phone deeper into the blanket fold with one hand while pretending to smooth the comforter. His eyes shifted once toward the movement. If he noticed, he didn't show it.

I shifted and patted the edge of the bed beside me. He looked at the spot for half a second, then sat down. The mattress dipped under his weight.

He looked at me for several moments without speaking. Then, very gently, he reached up and moved a strand of hair back from my forehead so he could see the fading bruise near my temple.

"Still sore?" he asked.

"A little."

"And the shoulder?"

"Only hurts in the morning."

His hand lowered. His gaze stayed where it was. Then he asked, too casually to be casual, "Would you mind telling me again how the car slid off the road?"

There it was. I had known he would come to it sooner or later. My stomach tightened. I looked away first, toward the window, toward the yard that had gone bluer as the light died.

"I told you," I said. "Something ran out in front of me."

"What?"

His eyes stayed on me, calm and focused. Something felt off, and I realized he wasn't blinking.

"A squirrel, I think," I said, hating how quickly the lie came. "I swerved. The road was wet. I overcorrected, and the car went into the ditch."

Dad still didn't blink. The awareness of it made my skin crawl against my will. Outside, a branch rasped lightly across the side of the house.

"A squirrel," he repeated.

"Yeah."

He sat there a moment longer, saying nothing at all, and somehow that was worse than being pressed. Then he nodded.

"Where's the car now?"

"Jack had it pulled out."

"Hm."

"And towed to a shop in town," I said, trying to keep my tone flat. "Although honestly it looked totaled to me. Jack thinks they can patch it up enough to get it running again."

Dad listened with the same terrible stillness. I looked at him and knew he didn't believe me. Or rather, I knew he believed the accident had happened, but not the whole truth of it. The lie sat there between us, thin and obvious. I could tell he felt it. And for one awful second I was afraid he would push, that he would keep following the thread until I either told him the truth or had to lie harder.

Instead, something in my face must have betrayed too much, because his expression softened a bit.

"All right," he said.

The words landed with such unexpected mercy that my shoulders loosened before I could stop them. He saw that too. For a moment his gaze stayed on me, thoughtful in a different way now.

Then he leaned back and exhaled through his nose.

He was quiet for a while. Just when I opened my mouth, he broke the silence.

"When I first moved to the city," he said out of the blue, "I thought the air itself would kill me."

I stared at him. "What?"

A faint, real amusement touched his face. "The smell," he said. "The smog. The exhaust. Garbage in summer. Old grease. Too many people pressed too close together, carrying too many scents." He shook his head. "It was like breathing through dirty, sweat-drenched cloth."

I found myself smiling despite nearly gagging. "Seriously? It was that bad?"

I watched him nod.

"Why then? Why did you put up with it?"

He shrugged. "I was still trying to impress your mother at the time."

That got an actual laugh out of me.

Dad looked down at his hands. "For the first few months I would come home from work with headaches that sat behind the eyes like nails." His voice had gone quieter. "I would open the apartment windows in January, and your mother would wrap herself in three blankets and glare at me from the couch."

"Sounds like her."

He nodded.

"It was she who taught me to stop noticing half of it," he said. "Or rather, to choose what to notice. Her perfume. Baby shampoo. Coffee in the kitchen." A softness came into his face then, brief and unguarded. "I could bear anything after a while if I knew I was coming back to the three of you."

The room felt very still around those words. I looked down at the folded blanket.

Dad was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "You and your sister were never supposed to be possible."

My eyes lifted at once. He wasn't looking at me now. His gaze had drifted toward the window, toward the darkness pressing weakly through the glass.

"When your mother got pregnant with you..." He let out a small breath that almost turned into a laugh and didn't. "I was terrified. Not because I didn't want you. Because I didn't dare believe it. I kept expecting something to go wrong, some correction from the universe." He swallowed once. "Then they put you in my arms, and I remember thinking, absurdly, this baby can't be mine. Nothing this miraculous could possibly belong to me."

The words hit hard.

He kept speaking, but slower now, as if each sentence had to make its way through layers of memories and hurt. "I wanted to give you both everything. You and Hailey. Your mother and I had plans." A shadow passed over his face. "So many plans." His mouth tightened. "And then..." He stopped.

I knew better than to fill the silence. The grief that crossed his face then was not the wild grief from before, but something that had finally settled into some corner within him without tearing him apart.

He looked at me again. "I'm sorry I brought you girls here," he said quietly. "I'm sorry, pup. I mean it. For everything that happened, everything I put you through."

"Dad," I said, before I could hear him slipping toward that old brutal rhythm of blame. "Don't."

He looked at me, startled enough that it almost hurt.

"Look." I sat up straighter despite the pull in my shoulder. "I'm not going to lie to you and say I think this place is good and safe. It isn't. We both know it isn't." I drew in a breath. "But if you hadn't brought us here, I never would have known any of this."

His expression hardened with immediate objection. "Kelsey..."

"No, listen." My voice stayed low, but I held his eyes. "I wouldn't know my grandparents. I wouldn't know what you are. What I am. I would just go through life blind." I looked down at my own hands. "That probably would have been easier. Certainly safer. But not more right."

Silence. He stared at me with something like grief and pride and helplessness all tangled up together.

"Hailey and you are human girls in everything that matters," he said at last, and there was a desperate earnestness in it that made every word heavier. "You deserve a normal human life. That was all I ever wanted for you."

I almost laughed then, but there was no humor in it. "Normal human girls don't walk around with a smell that makes lupines go weird."

I said it lightly, with care packed into every syllable, because I still didn't want him to realize the full scope of what had happened at school, or in the woods, or how close the valley had already come to tearing itself open around me. Not yet. Not when he had only just found his footing again.

Dad's eyes narrowed.

"What I'm saying is," I went on, more carefully now, "normal left the building a while ago."

He looked away.

"You know that humans would look at you and see just another human," he said. "Out there, outside this valley, that's all you would ever be."

Something in me went cold. I looked at him more carefully.

"You've said that twice now."

He blinked. "What?"

"The outside world. A normal human life. People seeing us as no different from other human girls." I felt the shape of the thing beneath his words before I could name it. "Dad, what are you talking about?"

Something crossed his face then, too quickly to hold. Then he smiled, a small, tired smile.

"Nothing," he said. "Forget it. I'm talking nonsense."

I didn't believe him for one second. But I also knew that pushing him right then would only make him retreat behind the same wall he had only just stepped out from. So I let it lie. For now.

The silence that followed sat fuller than the ones before it. Dad looked at me for one long second, then opened one arm in a movement so tentative and unshowy that I nearly missed the offer in it. I went without making him ask twice.

His embrace was careful, as if he was still measuring himself against what he feared in his own strength. I felt that restraint in every inch of him, in the way his arm spread between my shoulders, his hand grasping my upper arm too lightly, like he was holding glass. I wrapped my arms around him too.

"I mean it," I said quietly against his shoulder. "It's too late anyway. We're here. You're back. We're not splitting apart just because things got ugly."

His arm tightened by the smallest fraction.

"We're a family," I murmured. "And families stay together."

He didn't answer right away. Then I felt him nod. He held me like a father who had come back from a terrible place and meant to stay. Yet still, the unease remained. Because underneath that, quiet as a blade under cloth, was the feeling that some part of him was already thinking ahead to something he hadn't told me yet.

I didn't argue. Maybe because I was afraid of what he'd say if I pressed. Maybe because I thought if I believed him it would somehow turn out to be true.

When he finally drew back, his hand came to my cheek for a second. He looked tired again.

"Go get some rest," he said.

I nodded. He hesitated. For a moment I thought he would say something else, but then he got up, walked to the door, and left.

I sat there on the bed for a long time after that, staring at the space he had occupied, listening to the muffled sounds of the house beyond my room. Hailey playing with her dolls out loud. Elise moving down the hall. Dad's footsteps, slower now, descending the stairs. Under my blanket, my phone held the hidden parts of my heart.

I took it and looked toward the window, where the barn and the woods beyond lay still under the dark clouds. Dad never said things he didn't mean. And I sat there with the phone in my hand and the sudden realization that this valley had crawled its way under my skin in ways I never could have imagined. And the terrifying thought that I no longer wanted to leave.