Page 42 of A Wolf's Revenge

I started in 1988, with my father, the Conti partnership, and the shape of the world I had grown up inside. I told her about the mission — the specific, deliberate assignment to get close to a girl in order to use her. I told her about Kerra. I told her about St. Jude’s, the library, the planetarium, and the six months of falling in love with someone I had been sent to exploit. I told her about the pregnancy, the tickets to Stockholm, and the ring. I told her about Jeff’s call, the fire, the aconite my father had seeded through the grounds so the Conti pack couldn’t turn, the hallway I couldn’t get through, the wet drapes, and the moment the fire reached us. I told her about waking up outside the building and Kerra not being there.

Amy did not speak. She held her wine and she listened with the full, precise attention she brought to everything that mattered to her. I watched her face absorb it — not performing reaction, just receiving it, the way she received everything: directly, without protection.

I told her about the years after. The leaving. The deliberate project of building a new life from nothing, the choice to go clean, the understanding that the only way to make something worth having was to stop operating the way my father had operated and never go back. I told her about the work it had taken, the years it had cost, the night I met her at a friend’s dinner party, when she had argued with me about something I no longer remembered and I had understood, on the drive home, that I was in serious trouble.

I told her that I had never told her about Kerra because some part of me had believed that telling her would be the thing that ended us, that I had been protecting us both, and that I understood now that I had been protecting myself.

I told her that the child in the fire had been mine.

That was the hardest sentence. It sat in the room after I said it with the particular weight of something that has been carried alone for a very long time and has finally been put down in front of another person. Amy looked at me, I looked back at her, and neither of us spoke for a long time.

“How long have you been carrying that?” she asked. Her voice was very quiet.

“Thirty-four years,” I said. “Give or take.”

She was quiet for another moment. “The times you’d wake up and go to Noah’s room in the night. When you thought I was asleep.”

I hadn’t known she’d seen that.

“I thought you were having nightmares,” she said. “I thought it was the past catching up with you in the way the past does. I didn’t know what it was specifically.” She set her wine down. “I should have asked.”

“You couldn’t have known what to ask,” I said.

“No.” She looked at her hands. “But I knew there was something. I’ve known for years that there was a road you hadn’t taken me down.” A pause. “I decided to wait. I thought you’d tell me when you were ready.” She looked up. “I didn’t think it would take a kidnapping.”

The sound that came out of me was something I hadn’t expected — not quite a laugh, but adjacent to one. The release of a pressure that had been building for both four days and thirty-four years, simultaneously.

Amy looked at me with those dark, steady eyes and did not look away.

“I’m angry,” she said. “I want you to know that. Not about Kerra — I understand what you were at twenty-two years old, I understand what guilt does to a person across those years, and I’m not going to hold her against you.” She held my gaze. “I’m angry that you didn’t trust me. That you looked at what we had and decided it couldn’t hold the full weight of you.”

Her voice stayed even, but something underneath it had shifted, and because she was a wolf and I was a wolf, she didn’t have to spell out the shape of the thing underneath. We had never needed many words for it. She had come to me eleven years ago with the bond already lit on her side — I had felt it the way you feel heat through a wall, knew what it was, knew what it meant she was offering — and I had married her and built a life with her and given her, in return, a wolf that never fully answered. A bond that ran one direction. She had spent eleven years loving a man whose other half stayed silent, and she had never once asked me why, because asking would have been a way of demanding something I might not have been able to give.

“You let me wonder,” she said quietly. That was all. “For eleven years, you let me wonder if it was me.”

“It was never you.”

“I know that now.” She looked at me. “I didn’t, Zimife. For a long time, I thought I’d imagined it. A wolf bonds once — that’s what we’re all told. I bonded to a man who couldn’t seem to bond back, and I decided the lore was wrong, or I was, and I stayed anyway because I’d rather have half of you than all of anyone else.” Her jaw tightened, not at me — at the eleven years. “You could have told me there’d been someone before. That she’d taken the rest of it with her when she died. I’d have understood. I’d have stopped wondering. Instead, you let me carry it alone, the same way you carried everything alone, and that’s the part I’m angry about.” A pause. “Not that your wolf was quiet. That you never trusted me enough to tell me why.”

I said nothing, because she was right, and saying so wouldn’t be enough.

“I needed you to know that,” she said. “Before anything else.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

She held my gaze for a moment longer, making sure I had understood the full weight of it. Then she exhaled slowly, picked up her wine, and sat back slightly; the quality of the silence between us shifted — from the charged quiet of accountability into something more like the silence of two people who had just cleared the ground and were looking at what was left.

“Tell me about her,” Amy said.

I looked at her.

“Kerra,” she said. “Not the mission. Not the fire. Tell me who she was.”

I thought about the library at St. Jude’s. I thought about the planetarium, the multiverse theory, and the particular way Kerra had of saying things plainly because she believed that naming something honestly was the first step to deciding how to live with it.

I thought about her on the floor of a burning room telling me to go save four children instead of her.

“She was the most honest person I’ve ever known,” I said. “She said exactly what she meant, always. She expected the same from the people around her, and was disappointed when they didn’t manage it without ever being surprised.” I paused. “She wanted to study astronomy. She wanted to fly to space. She had this theory about the multiverse — that every choice you make branches out into an infinite number of other versions of your life.” I stopped. “She said consequence was the universe’s only category, not right and wrong. I’ve been thinking about that for thirty years.”