Chapter 1

I was bringing him tea when I heard it.

That's the part I keep tripping over. Not even the song he was singing. My dedication to his tea; too strong, no sugar, the blue cup because he won't drink out of the white ones, two almond biscuits on the saucer because he forgets to eat after nine and gets a headache and blames the screen.

23 years I've been handing that man things. I'd have said it was love. I'd have said so that afternoon, without thinking about it, if anybody had asked.

The study door was open about a hand's width, and I stopped in the hall because he was singing.

Kieran doesn't sing. He sang once, at a bonfire, when we were seventeen, and Fenn Iverly did an impression of it for a month, and Kieran went quiet in that particular way of his and didn't say a word the rest of the night. I've brought it up maybe four times since but I stopped when I noticed it wasn't funny to him.

Tonight he was singing The Long Field.

My mother's song. Nine verses, and there might be eleven people alive who know past the fourth.

He was on the seventh. His voice went down into it the way you go down into water you already know the temperature of.

She'd have taught it to him gladly. She adores him. Everybody adores him, and that has never once been the problem.

And he was doing it in the low register.

My father used the low register three times in my whole childhood. Once was the night we lost the Corrin boys under the ice.

The song stopped.

"Sleep well, little one," Kieran said, in a voice I have never in my life heard come out of him.

Then he played it back to check it, and I stood in my own hallway with a tray in my hands and listened to the whole thing again from the beginning.

I didn't knock. I know I should have knocked.

He was at the desk with his phone in his hand and he didn't look up.

"Out."

I got maybe two steps in.

"Thea. I'm working. Out."

The file was open on the screen behind him with her whole name on it, and under it another from the week before, and under that another.

So I said sorry.

That's what I did. I stood in my fiance's study eleven days before our wedding, looking at three audio files with another woman's name on them, and I apologized to him for coming in.

I said sorry, and I backed out, and I closed the door softly so the latch wouldn't click, because he hates the click.

Ravensholt doesn't pass to a daughter. My father spent four years trying to get the rule struck and couldn't carry the Elder board, and when I was twenty he called me into the map room and said there were three men the board would accept, and that whatever I said he'd write down.

He didn't choose Kieran, I did.

I sat in that room and said his name, and my father was quiet a moment, and then he said "then it's Kieran" and wrote it in the book. Kieran Braddock was a river farm second son with no standing anywhere in the Vale.

He runs this pack because I said four syllables when I was twenty years old.

I've never once held that over him. I've been so careful about it that I think I trained myself out of being able to.

It took me nine minutes to pack.

There wasn't much. I'd been moving in by degrees for 3 months, a bag at a time, because the ceremony was in days and making a production of it seemed silly. Most of my things are still at my parents' place at the top of the Vale.

I took the case I came with. I washed the blue cup and put it on the rack, and I have thought since that a stronger woman would have left it in the sink, and I'm not sure she'd have been right.

He was in the kitchen when I came through, at the counter with the phone against his ear, smiling at it.

I've known his face since we were four. I could tell you every one of its settings.

I'd never seen that one.

He looked up. He saw me and he saw the case.

Then he held up one finger.

I waited like a secretary. I stood in the doorway of the house I was supposed to move into in eleven days, holding a suitcase, and I waited for him to finish.

I've been waiting on that finger since I was nineteen.

"Kieran," I said, when he put his hand down. "We're finished."

He didn't put the phone down.

"I'll call the ceremony people in the morning. My father will send the settlement back, all of it, and I'll go to the Elder board myself so nothing lands on you. You keep the seat." My voice had gone flat, like I was reading somebody a delivery schedule. "I'm not taking that off you. I'd never. Be with whoever you want. I'm going to stop now. I'm going to stop loving you, and I'm saying it out loud so neither of us can pretend later that I didn't."

He looked at me.

His brows came together. He was inconvenienced.

"Thea, keep your voice down. You're being loud."

Then he turned his shoulder to me and said into the phone, in the warm voice, "No, nothing. Say it again."

And he laughed. Whatever she'd said, it was better than anything I'd managed in eleven years.

I got about forty feet down the drive before my legs quit and I had to stand still in the dark holding the handle of a case. My wolf was pushing up under my ribs so hard I put a hand flat on my sternum, and she wouldn't settle, and there was nothing to settle her with.

He's never used the low register on me.

Not the winter I had the marrow fever and couldn't hold water down for six days. He sat by the bed four nights and read to me off his tablet and he was kind. He was so kind.

You don't miss a thing nobody's ever done for you.

I called a car from the end of the drive.

My phone went while I was standing there and something in me came right up off the floor.

It wasn't a call.

‘Locked the front. Come back tomorrow.’

Wow.