Chapter 2

I was halfway down the drive when he came out.

"Thea. What did you just say?"

Sharp. Confused. The first time all night his voice did anything at all, and it did it because I'd walked away, not because of anything I'd said while I was standing in front of him.

I didn't turn around. I'd like to say that was strength. It was that I'd started crying about nine seconds earlier and I wasn't going to hand him that on top of everything else.

The car was waiting at the end of the drive. I gave the driver my parents' address and got in and shut the door, and I sat back against the seat and waited to feel relieved.

I'd been counting on relieved. I'd sort of promised it to myself in the hallway.

What I got instead was empty. Like somebody had opened my chest and taken something out and closed it again neatly, no mess, nothing to point at.

My phone went at the bottom of the hill.

I thought it was Mum. She always knows when I'm coming, she claims it's a Luna thing and my father says it's that she watches the road.

It was him.

*Locked the front. Come back tomorrow.*

That's when it came apart.

Not in the hallway with the song. Not in the kitchen when he held up a finger. Sitting in the back of a car at half past midnight looking at eight words about a door.

I made an awful noise. The driver's eyes came up in the mirror and I said sorry, I'm sorry, and he said nothing at all, just passed a squashed pack of tissues over his shoulder and turned the radio up two clicks so I'd have something to cry under.

I cried for the girl I was at fifteen, who thought if you loved somebody hard enough it eventually caught.

And I cried for the woman in the car, twenty-seven, two years into planning a ceremony for a man who'd never once looked up.

My mother opened the door before I knocked.

She didn't ask anything. She just took the case out of my hand and put both arms around me on the step, and I stood in the cold in a coat over the dress I'd been wearing to bring a man tea, and I let her.

"Bed," she said. "Everything else in the morning."

She's never liked him. She's never said so, not once in eleven years, and I always thought that was tact. I'm starting to think it was patience.

I told them at the kitchen table the next morning. All of it, in order, which took longer than it should have because I kept stopping to be fair to him.

When I got to the song my mother put her cup down.

"Say that again."

"He was recording The Long Field. For Wren."

"The Long Field."

"He was on the seventh verse, Mum."

My mother has been Luna of Ravensholt. She stood beside my father through two bad winters and the Corrin boys and a border business the Vale doesn't talk about, and I've seen her face down men twice her size without raising her voice.

She brought her hand down flat on that table and the mugs jumped.

"It's off. The whole thing. Off." Her voice had gone somewhere I've heard perhaps three times. "Eleven days from a mating and he can't keep his throat to himself? My mother sang that over me. I sang it over you. And he's put it on a recording for a girl in the marketing office so she can fall asleep to it."

"Odile," my father said.

"Don't Odile me, Bryce."

"I'm not going to." He was already standing up. "I'm going to make some calls."

My father was Alpha here for thirty-one years and I have never in my life heard him speak the way he spoke on the phone that morning.

He sent back the settlement, every last thing, and he did it inside two hours. He cut the two contracts Ballantyne holds with Braddock's river-farm cousins. He spoke to Kieran's father for eleven minutes and I heard about four of them through the hallway door, and the only whole sentence I caught was *she was in my house at two in the morning and you'll want to think about how that happened.*

He'd been polite to Kieran for eleven years. It turns out that was for me.

Then I called Petra Lisle.

I'd been meeting Petra once a month for two years. She has a binder for us. She'd found a supplier in the north who could do the greenery in the pack colors and she'd been so pleased with herself about it that she'd called me on a Sunday.

I said I was sorry to do this on the phone and that the ceremony wasn't going ahead.

There was a pause.

"Miss Ballantyne." Petra sounded careful in a way she never sounds. "I'll need to run that through Miss Coburn."

"Through who?"

"Mr. Braddock moved the file to Miss Coburn about six weeks ago. All the decisions, the vendors, everything. If you need a change you'd go through her now." She hesitated. "You didn't know that."

"No."

"Right." She cleared her throat. "The other thing, and I'm going to say it because I'd want to be told. The gown came in from the north on Tuesday. Mr. Braddock said you were busy and asked Miss Coburn to try it for fit. I've got the video. I'll send it over, and if there's anything you don't like we can still take it back to the seamstress."

I sat on my mother's stairs with the phone against my ear.

"Send it," I said.

The gown is ivory, and it's plain everywhere except the hem, and along the hem in thread the same color as the cloth are the nine verses of The Long Field.

My mother's seamstress put the first four on my mother's gown thirty-two years ago, because four was as many as they had space for. I asked for all nine. It took eleven weeks.

I've had a picture of it on my phone since August.

The video came through while I was still sitting on the stairs, and I watched about six seconds of it, and then I put the phone face down on the step beside me and looked at the wall for a while.

He gave her the song on a Tuesday.

He gave her the song on a Tuesday, and then he gave her the hem it's stitched into, and then he sat in his study eleven days out and recorded it for her in a voice he's never once used on me.

That's not a man losing his head over somebody.

That's a schedule.