Chapter 11: Play It Again

The settlement meeting was held in a plain room on the ninth floor of a human law firm.

My lawyer had picked it for that reason.

There were no portraits, no pack banners, and nobody's name on a wall.

Forty people sat in it.

Both sets of parents filled the rows facing a long table.

Behind them sat every wolf named in the letters, with their heads down.

Hester sat on my side of the room, next to my father.

Kellan sat alone at the back by the door.

I was in a wheelchair at the head of the table, with a warm blanket across my knees.

"We will begin with the footage," my lawyer said.

He pressed a key.

The wall screen lit up with the first game.

It was the kitchen. It was me, grey-lipped, coming through the door.

I had seen it once. I did not watch it again.

I watched the room.

A man in the third row had been laughing behind the camera in that video.

He was laughing now, a little, from habit. Then he saw himself on the screen and stopped.

Game two came on. Then game three.

The best man's mother put her hand over her mouth.

The maid of honor's father looked at the floor and did not look up again.

By the fifth video nobody made a sound.

By the eighth, a woman near the back had begun to cry quietly.

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