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She says it like a report. The clinic. The alley. The coat. Three years of being told to date someone normal. The word sent.

"She was nineteen," she says. "When they got to her. I was thinking about that on the way up. Nineteen. She was so young."

"Maren."

"And there's something she told me about Evelyn." She stops. Her hands go flat on the quilt. "I'll tell you later tonight."

"Okay."

"You're not going to push."

"No."

"You want to."

"Yes." I sit down on the floor with my back against the wood stove, so she's above me instead of under me. "But, you'll tell me when you’re ready."

She looks at the ceiling for a while.

"She brought me bread," she says.

Ours is breaking, my wolf says. Fix it.

I can't fix it. That's the whole job today. My father would have had six answers ready and every one of them would have been about what to do next, and I sat through my mother listening with a face like a closed door.

So I stay on the floor and I don't say anything and I let it be as bad as it is.

It takes about ten minutes.

"I kept waiting for it to turn into something else," she says. Her voice has gone thin at the edges. "Like she'd take a mask off and underneath there'd be a stranger and I could hate her the normal way. But, she didn't. It was just her. She sat in that car being my same best friend for forty minutes."

"Yeah."

"So which part do I get rid of?"

"None of it."

"That's not helpful."

"It's not supposed to be." I look at the quilt. "You can hate her for what she did and still grieve for the friend you thought you had. Those aren't the same person and you don't have to pick. She’s both, and it's going to be heavy for a long time, and that's not a flaw in you."

She makes a sound.

Then she comes apart.

She goes forward off the couch and I catch her before she's on the floor, and she gets a fist in my shirt and cries the way people cry when they've been putting it off for days, ugly and loud and shaking. I hold on and I don't say one word, because there's really nothing I can say.

Her whole back moves under my hand.

Ours, my wolf says, quiet now. Ours.

I know.

It's while she's still crying that I ask her, because I suck at timing and because I have to know before dark.

"Maren. On the road. Could you feel it?"

She stops.