Page 140 of Fate, Interrupted

“Yeah,” he says. “We are.”

I wake once more in the night. The nurses must have taken pity on him, because he’s asleep in a reclining chair, his head tipped back on a fresh pillow.

My gaze finds him in the dim room.

There’s a road three hundred miles long that we didn’t finish driving. A town at the end of it where only a handful of people know we’re coming. A quarter inch that went the right way, and a man finally getting the sleep he deserves.

A great deal is unresolved. Complicated. Without a clear answer. That conversation is coming when I have better access to my faculties and the liver situation has filed its last complaint.

I close my eyes.

Chapter forty

Norah

It’s been three days, and I’m finally up to taking care of business.

I call Penny first. It rings twice. She picks up on the second ring, meaning she’s been watching her phone.

“Norah.”

She says my name the way she says it when she’s been waiting and is relieved but isn’t going to say so directly.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey.” A pause. I can hear her reading the quality of my hey—Penny has been reading my heys since I was four years old and she was seven. “Where are you?”

“In bed,” I say. At least that’s not a lie.

The silence on the other end is the silence of Penny not saying what she’s thinking.

“I’m fine,” I say quickly. “I’m completely fine. Car accident—nothing serious. I’m just taking it easy.”

“Car accident,” she repeats.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure you’re fine?”

“I’m fine, Penny. Nothing more than a fender bender.”

Another silence. “Okay,” she says, in the tone she uses when she is accepting information she doesn’t fully believe and is choosing not to press. “Where?”

“About three hundred miles north of Larkin. We were…” I stop. “We left. Silas and I. We were on our way to Paxton.”

The silence this time is a different shape.

“Paxton,” she says.

“It’s a small town. There’s a wolf pack there, integrated, and he has family connections and a job prospect at a mill. We’re still going.”

Penny is quiet for a long moment. I can hear her breathing, the small sounds of her kitchen—the creak of the chair she always sits in when she’s having a hard conversation, the click of her putting something down on the counter.

“You left,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Without telling me.”