Chapter 4

I spent the day before at Fenn Iverly's with the curtains open and two bottles of something we shouldn't have opened at four in the afternoon.

Fenn has been Kieran's closest friend since they were nine. He was going to stand up for him. He'd had the suit two months.

He didn't ask me a single question. He put a film on that neither of us watched and he let his dogs get on the sofa, which he never does, and about an hour in he said, "I'm not going tomorrow."

"Fenn."

"I'm not going tomorrow."

"He's had you standing up for him since you were nine."

"Thea." He didn't look away from the television. "I drove you to the north yard at six in the morning on his birthday because you were worried about that line. Do you remember what you said in the car?"

"No."

"You said, he'll understand, it's work." Fenn reached down and put a hand on the nearest dog. "Twenty-one days. I watched you get through twenty-one days of it and I said nothing because it wasn't mine to say. I'm saying it now. I'm not going."

The run went up on my phone at about six.

Somebody had put it on the Vale page and it had four thousand shares by the time it got to me. The ridge fires lit the whole eastern arm, all nine of them, which happens twice a year and takes a week to arrange. Half the pack out on the top road at dusk. And underneath it, on the video, the howl going up off the ridge and rolling down the valley the way it does.

For Wren Coburn's birthday.

Over the long field. The lake in shot on the left, where the gathering was supposed to be on Saturday.

I've never been howled for. I want to put that down plainly and then move on from it. I've stood on that ridge nine or ten times in my life and heard it go up for somebody else, and I always thought that was just something that hadn't happened to me yet.

The comments were the part that finished me.

Somebody asked whether it was an Alpha throwing a party for his Luna.

And somebody else wrote: *No. Look at the date. He's mating on Saturday and it's a family arrangement, the girl's the old Alpha's daughter. So he's mating the one he doesn't want and lighting the ridge for the one he does.*

Two hundred and six likes.

I sat on Fenn's floor and cried for about four minutes, and it wasn't about Kieran. I'd finished with that on Tuesday, mostly. It was that four thousand people had worked it out and put it in a sentence, and I'd been in it for eleven years and hadn't.

Then I washed my face at Fenn's kitchen sink and came back and sat down, and he'd paused the film for me, which he pretended he hadn't.

"Are you going to say anything to him?" he asked.

"I've said it. He was on the phone."

"That's not saying it. That's you being decent at a man who wasn't listening." He topped up my glass without asking. "Thea, the whole Vale is going to be in that room on Saturday."

I didn't answer him. I'd already sat down at my parents' kitchen table at two in the morning with my mother's laptop, and I'd already recorded the thing, and I hadn't told anybody about it, not even Fenn.

I wasn't sure yet whether I was going to send it.

Here's the rest of it, and I wasn't there, so I'm giving you Fenn's version. He went in the end. He rang me on the Sunday and told me all of it in one go without stopping, and then he was quiet for a long time.

Kieran was odd from about ten in the morning. Checking his phone. Not saying anything, but Fenn's known him since they were nine and knows what the jaw does.

At half eleven he asked whether anybody had heard from me.

At noon he told Fenn to try my number.

Fenn said, "Mate, she's not going to pick up for me either."

And Kieran said, "She will. She always does."

That's what he said. Fenn repeated it twice on the phone because he wanted me to have it exactly.

He'd called eleven times by half past twelve. He'd rung my father, who hung up on him. He'd rung my mother, who did not.

And Fenn said the thing that made it worst was that Kieran wasn't frightened. Not until much later. He was irritated, the way you are when a supplier hasn't confirmed, and he kept saying *she'll be here*, and once he said, *she's making a point*.

The Wren business had been a joke. That's what he told Fenn afterward, and I believe him, because it's exactly stupid enough to be true. She'd asked to see the gown, and he'd said fine, and somebody had filmed it, and by the time it got back to him he'd decided it was funny. He thought I'd see it and be jealous. He thought I'd turn up early on Saturday with my chin out, the way I used to at nineteen, and he'd get to be magnanimous about it.

He had eleven years of evidence that I'd come anyway.

I want to be fair to him one last time, and then I'm finished being fair to him.

He wasn't planning to leave me at that altar. He was planning to marry me on Saturday and then go on exactly as he was, forever, and he'd have been baffled and hurt if anyone had ever called that cruelty.

The music started at two.

He straightened his cuffs. Fenn says he smiled, actually smiled, because the doors were opening and this was the bit where I came back the way I always came back.

Then Wren Coburn came through them in my gown.

Nine verses along the hem in thread the color of the cloth. Veil down. Flowers in her hair, the pink and gold I chose in March.

Fenn says the room went so quiet he could hear the fabric moving.

Kieran didn't move for four seconds. Then his hands came off his cuffs and dropped, and he took one step forward and stopped, and he said it loud enough that it came back off the far wall.

"Why are you here? Where is Thea?"

I was two hundred miles north by then, in the passenger seat of my father's car, with my mother asleep in the back and the coast coming up on the left.

And Petra Lisle, who I had blocked and who had found a way to reach me anyway, was cueing up the file I'd sent her at four o'clock that morning.