Page 74 of Fate, Interrupted

“Tell me something,” she says. “Why do you think your mother spent years warning you away from wolves?”

The question hits differently than I expect. Not because I don’t know the answer—I do. I’ve always known my mother’s careful cautions whenever the subject came up, how she would go still in a way I learned to read early. I know the shape. I’ve always attributed it to the world she grew up in, the attitudes she absorbed, and the things she was taught.

But the way Claire says it—

The weight she puts on years…

“Claire,” I say, warningly.

“Your mother loved a wolf,” she says.

Claire says it without softening the words.

The words arrive clean and direct and with no softening, because Claire has never softened anything in her life, and she isn’t starting now.

“She was young. She was certain it was worth whatever it cost. And it cost her everything.”

She pauses. Lets it go where it’s going. “It nearly destroyed our family. Years, Norah. Years of our parents trying to hold things together while your mother came apart over a man she couldn’t have, who couldn’t stay, who made every single person around her pay the price for what he couldn’t give her.”

I hear it.

All of it.

And I feel the pavement under my feet move.

It’s not the information exactly, my mother’s private confession lives in me. I hear her say I wish I’d been braver with her eyes somewhere else, somewhere long ago, and I’ve always known there was a shape behind it I didn’t have the full picture of. I’ve always known.

But hearing it said out loud, in the middle of a sidewalk, with Silas standing two feet to my left—

I feel the crack happen.

It’s small. Hairline. I pull it back before it shows, or I try to, pressing the pieces back into place, refusing to fall apart on a public street in front of this woman who has been waiting for exactly that.

“She told me she wished she’d been braver,” I say. My voice stays level. I don’t know how.

“She told you what a grieving woman tells her daughter,” Claire says, and it’s not cruel how she says it, which somehow makes it worse. “She told you the romantic version. She didn’t tell you what the rest of us lived through while she was busy trying to be brave.”

People keep moving around us.

Laughter filters from a group on the corner.

A bus passes on the cross street, the sound of it large and indifferent.

I don’t look at Silas.

I can’t look at him.

Because if I look at him right now I will feel the full weight of what just happened, my mother’s history, my mother’s grief, my mother’s private confession turned into a weapon and fired on a public sidewalk. Witnessed by the man I trust but know instinctually I probably shouldn’t. And I know I cannot hold the crack closed.

“She also tried to warn you,” Claire says. “You know she did. Because she knew. She knew exactly where this goes.”

“You don’t get to speak for her,” I say.

“I’m not speaking for her. I’m telling you what I watched happen to my sister for the better part of a decade.”

She steps back. “I loved your mother. And I watched her love almost ruin her. So, when I tell you this is a mistake, I’m not judging. I’m speaking from experience.”

She looks at Silas one last time, a warning delivered directly, one person to another, without the pretense of it being about anything other than what it is.