Chapter 24: The Alpha

I moved into the Alpha house on the ridge a week after the Harvest Moon.

I did not want to. Hester made me.

"A seat needs a roof," she said. "The pack has to know where to knock."

They knocked all week.

They came with casseroles and complaints, with a broken tractor and a lease dispute and a baby with a fever at two in the morning.

I took the fever myself. It was the one thing in the house I knew how to do.

On the eighth day, Maisy and I opened the nursery door.

The yellow walls were exactly as I had left them, the second coat still faintly streaked where I had rushed the corner.

There was a white crib against one wall, and no circlet on the rail.

Someone had taken it away. I never asked who.

Maisy stood beside me and said nothing, and I loved her for it.

"I thought I'd paint it," I said.

"Do you want to?"

"No." I looked at the streak in the corner. "I want to keep it."

Hester came up the stairs behind us with her cane and three heavy quilts over her arm.

"Your mother's," she said. "She made one for every winter of her marriage. I kept them in the cabin."

She unfolded the first on the floor.

It was a pattern of small blue stars on a white ground, stitched by someone with a steady hand and a great deal of patience.

I knelt and put my face in it.

It smelled of cedar, and of a house I had not been inside since I was eleven.

"It was meant to be a nursery," I said into the cloth. "I don't know what this room is now."

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