And this year, the new feature. Gerald, seated beside me. Gerald, pulling out my chair. My mother across the table with her hands clasped, watching us with her hands clasped like it's all finally going according to plan.
“Mom.”
“And before you say you're too busy, your cousin writes entire novels, manages a pack, and is giving this family a baby, sweetheart, so I know it can be done.”
And there she is. Cara. Cara, who I love. Cara, who went home and ended up bonded to her three high school sweethearts, which is a very different thing from conjuring three alphas out of thin air, not that anyone in this family is interested in the distinction. She's been deployed against me on every one of these calls since, like a closing argument.
Here's the truth about me, and it isn't flattering. When I get cornered, I don't push back. I never have. I reach for whatever makes the worried sound in someone's voice stop fastest. I've spent my whole life being the easy one, the fine one, the one nobody has to fret about, and I am so tired of being the project this family gathers around to fix.
“You don't have to set me up,” I say. “I have a pack.”
Silence.
One full, beautiful second of it. Inside that second, the worry just drains out of the line, gone, like a plug pulled from a sink.
And it feels good. It feels embarrassingly good.
“You have a what?”
“A pack.” Take it back. Take it back right now, you absolute catastrophe of a woman. “I, um.”
“You have apack?” Her voice climbs somewhere I have never heard it go. “Josephine Anne. Since when? How long? Who are they? Frank.” Her hand muffles the speaker. “Frank, she has a pack.”
From somewhere deep in the house, my father makes the sound he makes for touchdowns.
“Mom—”
“You'll bring them. Oh, you have to bring them, everyone will be there, all of us, finally?—”
And then her voice cracks. Right down the middle.
“Baby, I have been so worried about you. And you've just been keeping them all to yourself?”
And that's the sound of it. The worry I've spent twenty-eight years trying to smooth off that voice. Gone. Replaced by something so happy it hurts to hear.
This is the moment. A braver woman laughs and says Mom, I panicked, there's no pack, I'm sorry. The sentence is right there. Eleven words. I've talked toddlers off ledges with less.
“They can't wait to meet you,” I say.
Excellent teacher. Patient friend. Genuinely fun at parties.
And the single most spineless liar the great state of Montana has ever produced.
She's crying when we hang up. Happy crying, dish-towel crying, calling for my father again before the line even goes dead. I stand in the gravel lot and let my scent do whatever it wants, since there's no one out here to fool but the magpie.
A month. A guest list with three blank lines on it. A mother forty minutes away, weeping with joy over a pack that does not exist.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes and make myself breathe. Okay. Okay. I wrangle twelve four-year-olds a day. I made this crisis, which means I can unmake it.
I need three alphas. I need them in a month.
And one of them already owes me a favor.
Chapter 2
Josie
There's a particular walk a woman does when she's just ruined her own life and has to re-enter a building like she hasn't. Shoulders back. Chin level. Coffee cup held like a credential.
