So that's how I end up on the back porch swing beside Finn's sister in the June dark, both of us with hot cocoa, because Gemma made it without asking, the way her whole family does everything. Marshmallows and all. The yard stretching out dark past the porch light, the kitchen window gold behind us, three alphas' voices going warm and low through the screen.
She settles in beside me, close and easy, no edge in it, the way another omega never is.
We rock a while. She lets the quiet be quiet. Vet patience. I'm starting to understand why Finn is the way he is, growing up outmaneuvered by this.
“You know he alphabetized his tool wall,” Gemma says, to her mug. “Whatever you did to him. He denies it. But I've seen the tool wall.”
“That could be about anything.”
“It's screwdrivers, Josie. By lengthandtype. The man reorganized his entire garage and told our mother it was 'seasonal.'“ She sips her cocoa. “In April.”
“Maybe he likes a tidy garage.”
“He kept a bike helmet with a crack in it for eleven years because it was 'still good.' He does not, historically, like tidy.” She flicks water off her hands. “He's different. My brother.”
“He seems the same to me. Sturdy. Rude.”
“Oh, he's still rude. He told me my scrubs made me look like a dental hygienist last Tuesday.”
“That's oddly specific.”
“He's an oddly specific man.” She pulls one foot up under her, rocking us slow, and her whole face has gone soft in a way that catches me off guard, the sharp vet dryness dropping off it all at once. “He's different, though. This last month. Since you. Lighter, like somebody took a thing off him he'd been hauling so long he'd stopped feeling the weight. And tonight...” She stops. Shakes her head. “I haven't seen him like tonight since we were kids. That's the whole sentence.”
I turn my mug in my hands, going nowhere.
“I hoped it'd be someone like you,” she says, and there's no dryness in it now, none. “Somebody who'd give it right back to him. Underneath all that grump he's the biggest softie in this family, and it kills him that everybody knows.” She looks at me, gray-green and warm and sure. “You're not scared of him at all. I can tell.”
“He's not scary. He's a bear who read one philosophy book.”
Gemma laughs, surprised, a real one, loud in the small kitchen. “Yes.Exactly yes. Say that at Christmas. Say it in front of him.”
She's grinning now, delighted, and bumps my shoulder with hers like we've known each other years instead of hours.
“I'm going to have a sister. A whole sister, and she's funny. Do you know how long it's been just me and the goats and a brother who treats a hug like a fire code violation?”
And that's the one that gets me. Gemma, cocoa going cold in her hands, lit up like the kitchen window behind us, telling me I'm a sister.
Because she means it. She has no reason not to. As far as Gemma Morrow knows, this is real, all of it, and she gets to keep me.
She doesn't know there's a date on it. Neither does her mother. Just me and three alphas at a kitchen sink, all four of us carrying it, and not one of us saying it to the other three.
I don't answer her. I mean to. Something easy and funny is supposed to come out, the way it always does, and instead the swing creaks through two slow passes and I find myself staring at the same dark stretch of yard while my cocoa goes cold in my hands.
In the kitchen Hudson lands a punchline. Cynthia shrieks. The night carries on being warm without me.
Gemma lets me do it. She doesn't fill the quiet, doesn't ask, just rocks us and waits me out, patient as a woman who spends her whole day with creatures that can't say where it hurts.
“Don't let him push you away,” she says, softer now, stilling the swing with one foot. “Whatever's pulling your eyes out to that yard. If it's my brother being my brother, if he's gone quiet on you somewhere, that's not him leaving. That's him bracing. He does it to everything he can't stand to lose. You push back.He's worth it, I promise. He's one of the good ones.” A beat. “They all are. Your three.”
She knocks her knee against mine, easy.
“You want to know the funny part? If you'd told me in May those three were going to end up a pack, I'd have laughed you off this porch. A fence post, a fireworks show, and a man who gets emotional about joists. On paper that's not a pack, that's a sitcom.” The swing rocks through a slow pass. “Then you watch them around you for one dinner and it's obvious. With you as their omega, they make sense. You're what they make sense around.”
It lands so exactly on the shape of what I keep in the drawer with the suppressant bottle, on the whole true terrifying size of what I have and can't afford to keep, that I have to look out at the dark yard and blink at nothing until my eyes behave.
Gemma pretends not to notice, and rocks us, and finishes her cocoa.
“And if he's ever actually awful to you,” she says, lighter, “come find me. I've been beating him up since I was six. He's bigger now, but he won't fight back and I fight dirty. I like my odds.”
