Page 9 of The Last Great Omegaverse

Now, after meeting Wren, the conversation seems even more important.

I’m up before the sun most mornings, which nobody who knew me as a kid would believe, because I used to be the sort of nine-year-old who had to be dragged out of bed by both ankles. Something about this land fixed that in me. You get up early enough times to watch the mist come off the fields, and pretty soon your body does it on its own, no dragging required.

The goats don’t care that I’ve had four hours of sleep. They want breakfast, and they want it loud. I’m halfway through filling the trough when I catch myself humming something Eleanor used to hum while she worked her stall, some tune I never learned the name of and never thought to ask for, and now I never will.

I worked the pumpkin stall three falls running, back when I was young enough to think the best part of any day was getting paid in pie instead of money. Eleanor never once let me leave without something delicious wrapped in a napkin, and she used to tell me, every single season, that I had an honest face. I never told her it meant more to me than she probably knew, coming from someone who’d clearly seen enough dishonest ones to have a comparison point.

I don’t tell people much about the house I grew up in, three towns over, my father running cattle and raising five sons, satisfied, as far as I could ever tell, with the four who didn’t cry at things. I was the youngest, the biggest even as a kid, hopelessly incapable of hiding what things did to me—sad songs, sunsets, a good story well told—and I felt all of it, loudly, in front of anybody who happened to be standing there. My father called it “being too much” so often growing up that I heard it less like a complaint and more like a name. Softer than my brothers. Quicker to hug. Quicker to cry, and worse than any of that, apparently, quick to say so.

I left home at seventeen, the same age Asher was figuring out how to be liked instead of taken seriously, except I went the opposite direction entirely. Didn’t learn to perform less. Just left before anybody else could keep telling me to.

Cal found me not long after, a season or two before he found Silas, half-starved and doing seasonal labor two counties over, sleeping in a shed behind a farm stand that paid me in produce more often than money. I don’t remember much of that first conversation beyond one thing: he never once told me to toughen up. Just asked if I wanted steady work and a roof, and when I broke down crying three days in over something stupid—a dog that reminded me of one from home, nothing more dramatic than that—he handed me a shovel, said work helps sometimes, and never brought it up again.

Nobody at Ashworth’s has ever called me too much. Cal built the whole place, half without meaning to, into somewhere that kind of too much just fit. Silas needed somebody who’d hug him even when he flinched away from it the first fifty times. Asher needed somebody who’d laugh at his jokes without needing them to be a wall first. I needed somewhere that let me be exactly this loud, this soft, this everything, without anybody standing in a doorway deciding it was a character flaw.

It’s part of why muffins delivered uninvited matter more to me than they probably should. It was never really about the muffins. It’s about getting to be a person who shows up loud and obvious about caring, and having that be the whole point instead of the thing somebody’s going to ask you to shrink down first.

Eleanor’s gone three weeks now and it still catches me sideways sometimes, mid-chore, no warning at all. I set the feed bucket down and stand there a second, letting it pass through me instead of fighting it, because Cal taught me a long time ago that grief you fight comes back harder.

I think about the woman inheriting all of it. Wren, with her chin up and her arms crossed and that mindful way of talking that tells you she’s decided not to trust anyone in this town yet, which is fair, given what she found out about the will yesterday.

I think about how she looked standing in that kitchen, furious with a right to be, and how something in my Alpha instincts wanted to cross the room and put myself between her and whatever was making her look like that, even though the thing making her look like that was, technically, partly me and partly my whole pack.

That wanting hasn’t faded any by morning. If anything, it’s gotten louder.

Back at the house, Silas has the ledgers spread across the kitchen table like he does most mornings, coffee going cold at his elbow because he forgets to drink it until it’s undrinkable. Asher’s leaning against the counter looking like a man who slept badly and knows exactly whose fault that is. Cal’s outside already, I can hear him at the far fence line, but he’ll drift back in soon enough. He always does, once there’s talking to be had.

“So,” I say, dropping into a chair across from Silas. “We’re helping her.”

“We already went over there,” Silas says, not looking up from the ledger. “Brought muffins. You were there.”

“I mean actually helping. Fixing the barn roof before it caves in on her. Getting that tractor running again. All the things Eleanor wouldn’t let us help with. The whole crop’s rotting, Silas, she’s got sixty days and a farm that hasn’t turned a real profit in years, and we’re just going to keep bringing muffins?”

“We’re going to keep bringing muffins,” Asher says dryly, “because muffins don’t come with obligations attached, and everything else does.”

“Since when do you care about obligations?”

“Since the woman I nearly—” He stops himself, jaw working, and doesn’t finish it, though we both know how that sentence ends, because half the county probably knows by now, given how fast news travels through Dot’s bar. “Since it got complicated, alright? I liked her before I knew who she was. Now I’m the guy who didn’t tell her, and every shovel of help I offer’s going to look like an apology I owe her. Which is fine, I do owe her one, but I’d rather it not be the only reason she thinks I show up.”

That’s about as honest as Asher gets before noon, and it softens something in me, the way honesty always does when it comes from someone who usually hides behind a grin.

“Nobody’s asking you to fix things by being useful,” I tell him. “I’m asking because the barn roof is genuinely going to fall on somebody, and because it’s the kind of thing we’d do for any neighbor, and because—” I look at Silas, at the ledger he’s still pretending to read instead of look up from. “Because you know as well as I do that farm doesn’t make it sixty more days without real hands on it, and ‘real hands’ isn’t a muffin basket.”

Silas finally looks up. There’s something tired in his face that isn’t merely about the coffee gone cold. “You understand what it looks like, us showing up with tools day two, when the will says her failure’s our gain? However good our reasons are.”

“I understand it,” I say. “I don’t care. Since when do we let how something looks decide whether we do the right thing?”

Nobody answers that right away, which is answer enough. I’ve never been the smartest one in this kitchen, not by a mile. Silas has the numbers memorized before I’ve finished reading them and Cal sees three moves ahead of anybody, but I know people. I know what decent looks like even when it’s inconvenient, and I know none of the three of them actually wants to sit here doing nothing while a woman loses her grandmother’s farm because we were too worried about appearances to pick up a hammer.

Cal comes in partway through the silence, boots leaving a trail of mud he doesn’t apologize for, and takes the temperature of the room the way he always does, quiet, quick, missing nothing.

“He’s right,” he says, before anyone’s told him what we’re arguing about, which is either unsettling or just proof he’s been half-listening the whole time. “We fix the roof. Get the tractor running if we can. Keep it simple, keep it practical, and let her decide how much more she wants from us after that.”

That resolves it, the way it usually does when Cal weighs in, and I feel something in my chest ease that’s got nothing to do with barn roofs and everything to do with all four of us actually agreeing on something, for once, before lunch.

What none of us says, though I’d bet real money every one of us is thinking it, is how strange it feels, all four of us circling the same conversation about the same woman on the same morning, like she’s already pulled some invisible thread taut between the four of us that wasn’t there two days ago.

Asher won’t meet my eyes when I mention her name too many times in a row. Silas keeps his jaw set in a way I recognize from him trying not to want something. Even Cal, who wants for nothing out loud, ever, stood at that fence line long enough this morning that I know he wasn’t just checking the wire.