Chapter 22: Open to Everyone

The gathering was held in the meeting barn, and every mother in Alder Creek came.

They stood along the walls with babies on their hips and toddlers hanging off their coats.

Some had come from the estate district.

Some had driven from towns two hours away, and I could smell the road on them.

Dalton stood beside me at the front of the room, and I felt his steadiness in my chest.

On the table in front of us lay my mother's notebook, open to its first page.

"I'm Della Brennan," I said. "Some of you know me as someone else's wife."

A few women nodded, and one of them smiled.

"My mother wrote this book for a pack that forgot her," I said.

"A company has been selling a weaker copy of it for a year, and it's about to go to four thousand stores."

I put my hand on the cover.

"I'm not selling you anything. Every page of this is yours."

The barn was very still.

Near the back, a woman stood up with a hand pressed to her stomach.

She was young, no older than twenty-five, and her eyes were wet.

"Three years," she said. "My mate and I have tried for three years. The healer said there was nothing wrong with either of us."

"Come here," I said.

She came.

I took her hands and turned them over.

Then I did what my mother had shown me when I was nine.

I smelled the inside of her wrist.

"You're short on moonroot," I said. "You're not broken, you're short."

I tapped the notebook.

"Anyone who has lived on the pack's well water for twenty years is. It's in the book."

She started to cry.

The woman beside her took her arm.

"There are copies at the door," I said. "Imogen has them."

I looked around the room.

"And I'll come on the first Saturday of every month and answer anything you ask."

A low sound went through the room.

It wasn't applause.

It was a hundred women breathing out, and then one of them started to laugh, and then another one.

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