Page 115 of Fate, Interrupted

He opens his arms.

I close the distance, and we hold on—briefly, in the way brothers hold on, the embrace carrying everything the conversation didn’t.

He lets go first and steps back.

His grin returns, slightly worn at the edges. “Go,” he says. “Before I say something embarrassing.”

I go.

I grab my backpack from my closet and pack emergency cash, extra clothes, and my wallet. On my way out, I take a small framed picture from the hall table. Mom is seesawing with me when I was probably four. Her head is thrown back in laughter, and my mouth is a big O of delight. That’s how I remember her. That’s how I remember myself with her.

I go downstairs.

The warehouse floor is about to close. The machines are cycling down and the crew is moving more slowly as the clock runs out. Someone calls across the floor while a rack of garments moves along the overhead rail.

Everything is designed to keep running whether I’m here or not.

I walk out the door. Across the gravel. Into the truck.

I sit for a moment as the amber floodlights click on, bathing the parking lot in a warm glow. I think about Norah, how she’s going to open the door and find me on the other side of it.

I put the truck in gear. I already know what I’m going to say to her.

I’ve known for weeks.

I’m done calling it anything else.

Chapter thirty-two

Norah

He says it so softly that for a second I think I misheard him.

Paxton.

I turn the word over in my mind—feeling the weight of it, the shape, what it promises, and what it might actually deliver. Outside the kitchen window, the last of the daylight has given up entirely, and the hanging lamp over the table has taken over, casting its warm, contained circle of light between us. It catches in the loose strands of my hair where they’ve escaped whatever I attempted this morning, turning them almost copper where the light hits.

“Three hundred miles,” he says. “Give or take twenty.”

I look at him across the table—his jaw, his eyes, hands resting flat on the wood. He’s not selling this. He’s not dressing it up in anything. He’s telling me that the truth is sufficient and doesn’t need decoration.

It’s extremely inconvenient that I find that attractive.

“And the wolves there—live openly?” I ask.

“More openly than the packs that live in Larkin,” he says. “They still keep pack structure. Territory, hierarchy, all of it. But they’re integrated into the human community. The city made a decision years ago that it was better for everyone if wolves were part of the social and economic structure.”

“That must have taken a long time.”

“It did.”

“And a lot of goodwill.”

“And a few decades of keeping livestock predators from the surrounding farms,” he says. “It turns out to be an extremely effective way of making friends with people who have livestock.”

I consider this. “So, wolves are basically very large, very efficient guard dogs.”

“That’s one way to put it.”