Page 95 of Fate, Interrupted

I think about Norah in her shop, how the afternoon beams of light come through the front window and catch the dust motes like silver. How she leans against the counter with her arms folded and her head tilted. I see her eyes crinkling with laughter.

I think about her on the lake, the poetry book in her lap, how she actually listened, the way people rarely do.

And then I think about this room.

What it would mean for her to understand, fully, what I’m connected to. Not the version I have given her, carefully measured, strategically incomplete, but this.

She should not be near this.

That thought has been present for weeks, in various forms, and I have used it as a reason to push back, to hold her at distance, to tell myself that pulling away is a form of protection.

But standing here after the other pack has left, listening to my father and my brother talk through routes and timing with the practiced efficiency of people for whom this is simply another weeknight, I finally see the truth I’ve been working around rather than facing directly.

There is no version of her around this that I’m comfortable with. I’m not comfortable with any version of myself in it, either, anymore.

There’s a difference between being capable of something and wanting to build your life inside it. I can do what this world requires. But I’m done wanting to. I’ve been confusing those two things long enough.

Elias’s voice carries across the warehouse floor, discussing the adjusted schedule for the north corridor. I look at my father, at his authority in this space and what it has cost him to be the man who stands at the table with his sleeves rolled and his voice even.

He’s been paying that cost my entire life.

I have been watching him pay it and calling it strength. It is the life he chose. But for the first time I’m asking whether it is the life I’m choosing or simply the life I inherited because I never stopped long enough to notice there was a choice.

There is a town three hundred miles from here.

Smaller packs established without the constant friction of the city, without the backroom drama.

I tucked it away at the time because I didn’t know what it was for.

I’m understanding now.

Logan wraps up the logistics with the efficiency of someone who doesn’t need to be told the same thing twice and does not expect others to either. The two men who held the back of the room have already moved toward the dock to resume whatever the evening requires.

My father looks at me.

It’s not a long look. Just the brief look he uses to confirm I’m still present and have absorbed what needed to be absorbed.

I nod once and walk out into the evening air. For the first time in a long time, it doesn’t feel like relief.

It feels like a direction.

Chapter twenty-five

Silas

The dining room always looks like it belongs to a different family.

That thought arrives every time I cross the threshold, and it never loses its impact. Everything in my brothers’ and my personal rooms carries the honest marks of people who actually live in them: boots by the door, jackets on chairs, the disorder of a place where work and home have never been fully separated because nobody has ever seriously tried.

But the family common areas, the den, library and dining room stay untouched by all of that. Pristine. Rooms that have been told what they are and have complied without argument.

My father sees to that.

The table is long and dark and polished to where you can see a version of yourself in it. Crystal at every place setting, not regular kitchen glasses, or horrors, highball glasses. My father has opinions about the difference and has never been shy of them. Linen napkins are folded with precision, if not artistic impression. The sterling silver is laid out in exact alignment. Plates from a different life are set precisely at every seat.

The dining room had once been my mother’s pride and joy. She made it elegant with her love of beautiful things. A mahogany sideboard, an original William Trost Richards sweeping landscape over the fireplace. After she died, my father kept the elegance and removed everything that made it feel inhabited. The fresh flowers went first, then the softer colors. Then the small imperfections that had made it feel like a room people ate dinner in rather than a showcase denoting a class system.

What remains is beautiful in the way museums are beautiful.