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Evelyn came in June and stood in front of my counter with her gloves in her hand and asked me out loud, like a person asking a favor, whether I'd shut something in a basement two counties over.

I said yes to that one. I said no in August and she took it without one word of argument, which I know she didn’t like, but too bad.

The Lantern has my shop hours. They don’t have me.

At eight I take my break in the back room and open the register drawer where I keep the things I don't look at.

There's a postcard in there from July. No return address, a picture of a diner somewhere flat, and four words on the back in handwriting I'd know in the dark.

I'm still not asking.

There are two more like it. I've answered one, and all I wrote was Not yet. I'm still trying to figure out if I can let Lila back in my life.

At eleven forty the crowd thins out toward the mansion and I flip the sign and lock the door, and Cass takes the cash bag and kisses my cheek and goes.

Then it's just me and the shop and candles that light themselves the second the room is quiet enough to hear me thinking.

This is the part the town doesn't know about.

I go into the back room and put my hand in the air, and I find the seam the way you find a zipper in the dark.

There are seven of them waiting tonight. There's a man from the hardware store who died in April. There's a girl in a hospital bracelet who’s been sitting on my back step since June and wouldn’t talk to me until August. There's someone's grandmother in a good coat who keeps apologizing for the trouble.

"It's not trouble," I tell her. "It's Tuesday."

I open it a hand's width. Not one inch further, and only tonight, when the veil's thin enough that it doesn't cost anybody anything.

They go through in the order they came to me. The girl looks back once at the doorway and lifts her hand, and I lift mine, and then the room is just a room.

I close it. It takes about four seconds and no lights blow out and nothing in the house slams, because I've had a year, and I'm good at this now.

Behind me, in the doorway, my handsome, terrifying, wolf shifter is standing there in the one suit he owns, watching me like the first time.

"You're staring, Corbett."

"Yes, I am, " he says.

GAGE

She shuts the world back up like she's closing a screen door, and I lose about a year off my life the way I do every time.

My wolf sits down in my chest, pleased with everything, loud as a dropped pan. He's been like this since November. He talks constantly now. He has opinions about the mailman.

Ours, he says, for probably the ninth time tonight.

I know.

Out on the square the party noise rolls up the block, and my pack is somewhere in the middle of it. Ansel's got his sister's kids on his shoulders. Tobin is running the cider table and telling everyone who'll stand still that he was here for all of it, which is a lie, he was at home. Cass has a scar from her wrist to her elbow that she shows people at the least provocation.

Nobody in this town believes a word about last year. Gas leak. It's on a plaque.

Maren blows out three candles by looking at them and leaves the rest.

"Come home," I say. "Or don't. There's a thing."

"A thing."

"Outside."