Page 48 of Fated, Allegedly

"I'm aware of my own options, Hanson."

"I know you are. Let me finish, I've been building it for six hours." I take her hand. "Every one of those exits was reasonable and none of them would have made you a coward, and you didn't take any of them. You stood in a gravel yard with a clipboard and counted the group of people nobody had ever counted. You went down that hole below twice. Thank you doesn't cover it, so I'm going to say the accurate thing instead. My pack is alive because a stranger decided we were worth staying for."

She doesn't answer for a while. When she does her voice has gone thin and unguarded.

"You've got it backwards, and I've been working out how to say it." She turns her hand over in mine. "I didn't stay for you people. I stayed because somewhere around the second week I stopped being able to think of myself as separate from you. There's no line in my head anymore between them and us." She laughs, wet and embarrassed. "Your mother tells me off about sleep. Wyatt eats my lunch. Bo corrects my data sheets and Hazel makes me tea I don't want. Nash, they're not the pack that took me in. They're my family. That's the whole thing. I don't have another one and I don't want another one."

I put my arm round her and she leans in against the good side, and we don't say anything else.

The sky goes gray, then a hard clean gold along the eastern ridge. A pair of fish eating ducks comes in low and lands out where the water used to turn. Somewhere behind us a door bangs and a child starts shouting about something urgent and trivial, and the first smoke of the morning goes up from Isla's chimney.

First sunrise in six weeks that nobody has to hold a line through.

31

ERIN

The offers start arriving on Thursday, and by the following Wednesday there are five of them.

They come in through Amelia, because my own email address has been dead since somebody wiped my laptop in April and I've never had the heart to rebuild it. She reads them down the phone to me while I'm sitting on Owen's porch steps with a mug of tea going cold in my hand.

Great Lakes still wants me, and they've moved. Deputy lead has become lead, five years instead of three, with a hiring line of my own. There's a research professorship at a university I applied to twice in my twenties and never heard back from. There's a federal appointment that would have made twenty-eight-year-old me weep into a sink. And there's one from a foundation that wants me to run a national program on industrial impacts to freshwater systems, and the salary attached to it is genuinely absurd.

"You understand what's happened," Amelia says. "Six weeks ago you were the woman whose grant blew up. Today you're the person who put a defense contractor in front of a grand jury with their own ecological assessment. Erin, there is no version of the next thirty years where you get this window again."

"I know."

"Then say something other than 'I know.'"

"I'm going to say no to all of them."

There's a silence long enough that I check the phone hasn't died.

"Explain it to me," Amelia says, "and if the explanation is good I'll stop shouting."

So I explain it, sitting on a step with everyone's noise going on behind me.

"There's a lake here that's been under industrial extraction for eighteen months and nobody has a baseline for it except me. I've got three weeks of pre-collapse data and six weeks of during. Amy, that's a longitudinal dataset that doesn't exist anywhere else and it will take fifteen years to be worth anything."

"Somebody else can hold the clipboard."

"Nobody else knows where the transects are." I watch Wyatt cross the yard with a bucket. "And I'll tell you the honest part, because you've earned it. I'm not turning these down out of scientific duty. I'm turning them down because I've got people here, and I've never had that anywhere, and I've worked out that I would trade every one of those five envelopes for the ability to walk into a kitchen and have somebody hand me a plate without asking who I am."

Amelia doesn't say anything for a while.

"You want the monitoring station," she says at last.

"I want the monitoring station. Permanent, state-funded, based on-site. I'll write the proposal tonight."

"Don't write it tonight, write it properly, and put a five-year staffing request in it because the department's about to be embarrassed into generosity." Her voice changes. "For the record, I think you're throwing away a career. I also think I've never heard you sound like this. I'll sign it Monday."

The permanent role comes through on Friday and it's better than I asked for.

Stillwater Basin Long-Term Ecological Monitoring, five years renewable, principal investigator, with a budget line for two field technicians and a laboratory allowance. Amelia strong-arms the department, and the department is currently very interested in being seen to care about Stillwater Lake, and I'm not above using that.

The rest of the job isn't in the paperwork, and we all know it.

I take that half to the elders on Saturday, because it isn't mine to assume. Hazel has her tenth notebook out. Owen leans in the doorway.