Page 12 of Knot the Plan
Home is a little blue house four streets off Main with a porch swing I never sit on, and by eight o'clock I'm on the couch with cold pasta, watching the group chat invent details about my pack in real time. Aunt Deb thinks one of them is a doctor. Nobody told her that. The lie is out there growing limbs without me.
There's exactly one person in this family I've never managed to lie to, mostly because I've never tried. I pull up our thread and type before I can think better of it.
Me: So hypothetically
Me: If someone told their entire family they had a pack
Me: When they definitely do not have a pack
Me: And now said family expects to meet this pack at the reunion
Me: How screwed would that someone be?
The phone rings four seconds later.
“Josie.” Cara's voice has the particular calm of a romance author who has plotted this exact disaster professionally. “What did you do?”
“Don't tell my mom.”
“Oh, this is bad.” A rustle. A door closing. The sound of my cousin settling in for the whole thing. “Start at the beginning and do not skip the part where you panicked.”
So I tell her, all of it, and she doesn't interrupt once, which is how I know she's enjoying herself. Somewhere in thebackground one of her alphas asks if she wants tea, and she shushes him like he's talking during a movie.
“Okay,” she says when I finish. “First, as your cousin, I love you and this is a catastrophe. Second, as a professional, the structure's actually solid. Fake pack, ticking clock, meddling mother. I'd buy it in paperback.”
“Cara.”
“Third.” Her voice gentles, and that's worse than the teasing. “Jos, a real pack doesn't perform. It's a hundred little things nobody thinks about. Who you lean on when your feet hurt. Who you look at first when something's funny. You can't fake that cold, and Mom's been watching the real thing her whole life.”
It's almost word for word what Lily told me three hours ago, in a fish tank's worth of light, and the two of them landing in the exact same place from forty minutes apart is its own kind of verdict.
“You're the second person to tell me that today,” I say.
“Then the second person is also right. Whoever you find, you'd better rehearse.”
“I have a plan.”
“You have a month and a list, knowing you.” A pause. “I'm keeping your secret. Obviously. But I want it on record that I'm doing it because watching this happen in person is going to be better than anything I could write.”
“You're carrying my future godchild. Be nice to me.”
“I'm being so nice to you. Goodnight, Josie. Go get your pack.”
She hangs up. The group chat scrolls on without me, the whole family planning a welcome for three alphas who don't know they exist yet.
Tomorrow morning. The golden retriever.
I fall asleep on the couch rehearsing the pitch.
Chapter 4
Josie
Wednesday morning, I make a tactical error. I go to Dottie's first.
I'm running on fumes, because I passed out on the couch before nine and woke at six to my phone convulsing, my mother polling all the relatives on dietary restrictions “for the caterer,” and there is no caterer, there has never been a caterer, the reunion is potato salad and a banner. I need coffee before I can recruit anyone, and Dottie's has the coffee.
It also has Pete.
