Chapter 3

I watched it three times.

Wren looks lovely in it. I'm not going to pretend otherwise, because pretending otherwise is what everybody expects of me and I've got a stubborn thing about that.

It fits her. That's the part I keep going back to. It was cut to me in August and it fits her in November, which either means Petra's seamstress is a genius or somebody gave her my measurements and told her to hedge.

She turns for the camera. She does a little peace sign. One of the fitters is behind her with a pin in her mouth, tucking a strand of hair back, and she takes the pin out and says, "Luna, you look unbelievable. That hem was made for you. If he saw you now he'd go straight down on one knee all over again."

Nobody corrects her.

That's a room of nine people. Petra's in that room, I can hear her breathing near the camera. Somebody calls Wren Coburn the Luna of Ravensholt out loud with a pin in her mouth, and nine people let it stand, because by Tuesday afternoon it had stopped being a mistake worth anybody's time.

And Wren laughs, and sticks her tongue out at the lens like she's in on something, and says, "Thanks. Honestly, I wish. Shame somebody won't give me the chance."

Then her phone goes, and she picks it up, and she puts it on speaker so the whole room can hear.

His voice comes through warm.

"Someday you'll get your wish."

I stopped the video there. I've never seen the rest of it.

Here's the thing I'd been avoiding for about fourteen hours.

I called it off Tuesday night. Wren had that gown on Tuesday afternoon.

I wasn't the one who ended it. I was just the last person in the Vale to find out it was over.

I deleted the file and blocked Petra, which wasn't fair to Petra and I'll write to her eventually, and then I went out and walked the top road for two hours in my mother's boots.

It was clear and very cold and I could see the whole Vale from the third bend, the river farms, the long field itself, the roof of the house I was supposed to move into on Saturday.

I kept trying to find the moment. That's what I was doing up there, though I didn't work it out until I was most of the way home. I kept scrolling back through eleven years looking for the afternoon it went wrong, because if I could find it I could be angry at something with edges.

I couldn't find one. There isn't a moment. There's just a very long stretch of a man being exactly himself while I did the work of interpreting him generously.

He messaged while I was out.

*Come back to the house.*

Not where are you. Not what did you mean. Come back to the house, the way you'd say it to a dog that's got out.

I laughed at it, standing on a ridge in the cold on my own. I actually laughed.

Wren rang me at nine that evening.

I didn't know the number. I thought it was Fenn.

"Thea? Hi." Sweet. Genuinely sweet, that's what I can't get past. "Sorry, this is going to sound mad, but where does Kieran keep his ceremonial sash? The grey one with the pack braid? I've been through the whole dressing room and it's not anywhere."

There was a hum on the line. Big room. His hallway does that.

"He's in the study," she said. "He's recording another one for me, so I said I'd find it myself, only I can't. And it's the day after tomorrow, isn't it, so I want everything right for him."

I stood in my parents' kitchen holding the phone.

I could have said a great many things. I've since thought of eleven.

What I actually said was, "Second drawer down in the cedar press. It gets damp in the wardrobe."

"Oh, you're a lifesaver."

"Yes," I said, and hung up, and blocked her.

Then I went upstairs and got my laptop and deleted him.

All of it. Prom. Both graduations. The lake at Ostmere the summer we were twenty-two. My birthday last year, where he came ninety minutes late and hadn't brought anything and told me he'd been held up, which was true, he had been held up, that was never the lie.

Eleven years. It took forty minutes.

I took him out of my emergency contacts, which sat oddly for a second, and then didn't. I changed every wallpaper to photographs of myself. Me on the ridge road. Me at the coast with Fenn's dogs. Me at nineteen before I ever taught myself to take up less room in a house.

I'm not doing this to hurt him. He'll never know it happened.

I'm doing it because I'd like to find out what I look like when he isn't in the frame.

His last message came at midnight, the night before.

*Be on time. You know what I do about people who don't meet their obligations to me.*

I know exactly what he does.

Two years ago I missed his birthday dinner. I was stuck at the north yard with a burst line and forty minutes of no signal, and I got there at nine and he'd already gone.

He closed the link on me for three weeks.

I want to be careful here, because to anybody outside a pack it sounds like a sulk. It isn't. He's Alpha. He can shut a member out of the link the way you'd close a valve, and he closed it on his own mate for twenty-one days, and I went to work and ate my dinner and sat in rooms full of people who were all talking to each other over my head.

On the ninth day I asked my mother if it ever ended.

On the fifteenth I apologized to him. I don't remember what for. I remember writing it three times to get the tone right.

On the twenty-second morning it came back on while I was brushing my teeth, and I sat down on the edge of the bath and cried with relief, and then I made him breakfast.

I read that message twice.

Then I typed *no* and deleted it, and typed nothing at all, and blocked his number.

Eleven days ago I'd have called that the worst thing I could do to him.

Standing in my old bedroom at midnight, I understood it wasn't a punishment at all. He was never going to notice. He'd simply have to find somebody else to close the valve on, and I'd wager he already had.