The Last Time He Called Me Dad novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Half Open

Conall finds the empty house and discovers the bond is still open on his side; Lorna brings soup and the elders give him six weeks to name a Luna before the seat is open to challenge, and he runs eleven miles to watch Catriona's window and feels her fall asleep with their son's head on her arm.

Conall's POV

The house was dark, and Tobin's boots were still by the door.

They were the small green ones with the left toe worn through.

He had kicked them off that afternoon in a hurry to get into his cloak.

I stood in the hall with my own coat still on and listened.

No kettle, no cartoon, no Catriona humming off-key in the kitchen.

The bond ran through the middle of that house, and for seven years I had never once had to look for her.

I reached for it now.

It wasn't gone.

That was the first thing I understood, standing there.

My end was open, raw as a split nail, and on the far end of it was her, small and far away and very quiet.

She wasn't angry.

She wasn't anything.

I put my hand flat on my chest.

The herb-healer's shed stood by the gate on the logging road, and I knew exactly what she kept on the shelf behind the counter.

I did not drive down to ask her.

I told myself I'd do it in the morning.

Somebody knocked, and I knew from the soft double tap who it was.

Lorna stood on the porch with a covered pot in both hands and her eyes swollen.

"Chicken and barley," she said. "You haven't eaten since noon. I put Emmett down at my mother's."

"Lorna, not tonight."

"Conall." She stepped past me into the kitchen, and I let her. "She'll be back by morning. She's hurt and she made a scene. She'll come back."

"She drank the Unbinding."

Lorna put the pot on the stove very gently.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, Conall."

She laid her hand on my sleeve.

My best friend used to do that, right before he said something I didn't want to hear.

Seven years ago I knelt in the mud on a boundary line with my best friend's blood to the elbows.

He gripped my wrist and said, "Look after them."

I said I would.

I have said it to myself every morning since.

Somewhere along the way I stopped asking whether the promise had a limit.

"What did I do?" I said.

Lorna's face did something quick and careful.

"You saved a sick child. Anyone would have."

"I walked past my son."

"You didn't see him."

"He said Dad. He said it twice."

"Conall."

"I stood on a rock and told a six-year-old not now, in front of the whole pack.

"Then I stepped on the toy I made him."

She took her hand off my sleeve.

I heard the elders' trucks pulling into the yard before she could answer.

All three of them came into my kitchen in their coats, and the old one with the white braid did not sit.

"We'll be quick," he said. "A Luna's seat can sit empty six weeks, no more. Midwinter, the Alpha names a mate to carry the pendant, or the seat is open to a challenge from any wolf in the pack."

"Catriona is my mate."

"She laid her pendant on the stone."

"She'll take it back."

"She drank the potion that cuts the bond, Conall. It's quiet on your side as well, isn't it?"

I did not answer.

The old man looked at me for a long time, and I saw him decide to believe my silence.

"Six weeks," he said, and they filed out.

When they'd gone, Lorna said gently, "I could stay."

"Go home, Lorna."

"You shouldn't be alone tonight."

"Go home."

She went.

I stood in the kitchen with a pot of barley I wasn't going to eat.

Then I walked into Tobin's room.

The nightlight was still on.

His bed was made, because she'd made it that morning, and a drawing of a wolf with four legs and one huge ear was taped to the wall above the pillow.

Written under it in her handwriting, from when he was four, were the words, My Dad.

I went out the back door and shifted on the porch steps and ran.

Eleven miles is nothing to a wolf.

I came down out of the trees across from Otis Sedley's cabin a little before three and sat at the edge of the road.

A light was on in the kitchen.

I didn't go closer, and I didn't know what I would say if I did.

The curtain moved, and she stood in the window.

I felt her see me.

It was the strangest thing in the world to feel her fear, and then her decision, one right after the other.

She pulled the curtain shut.

I stayed where I was.

Later the light went out.

Her heart slowed, and mine was somehow doing the same.

I felt her lie down, and I felt the weight of a small head on her arm.

I had never once held Tobin like that.

Not once that I could remember, in six years of bedtimes.

I put my muzzle on my paws and stayed there until it got light.

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