Chapter 4: The Line

Ned's POV

I woke at four, as I had for fourteen years.

I lay on my back in the dark and listened to the wall.

On the other side of it, ten feet from my bed, a woman slept in a cold room with a stove I had told the housekeeper to lay.

I could hear her breathing.

I could hear it in my teeth.

My wolf lay across the foot of the bed with his grey muzzle on his paws, and he was not asleep either.

He had not made a sound since Saturday.

It was the silence that bothered me.

A wolf who hated would have snarled.

This one watched the wall.

I did not say the word for it, even in my own head.

I pulled on my boots and went out through the kitchen into the yard without a light.

It was black cold, with frost on the gravel.

I walked down through the orchard to the old fence where McCracken land stopped.

On the other side of it the ground fell away north into the dark.

That was Laurel Gap.

I had stood at this fence every Sunday for fourteen years.

I had never once gone over it.

I could not have told anyone why, and nobody had ever dared to ask.

I told myself it was respect for the law of the ridge.

I told myself a good many things.

I stood with both hands in my coat pockets.

What I saw in the dark was a face.

It was not Bethany's.

I had stopped being able to see my sister's face in the third winter.

This one had grey-green eyes and a braid down its back.

It was saying *I'm standing where I like* with its chin up.

Nobody had spoken to me like that in years.

I had not known how badly I missed it.

I shut the thought like a drawer.

She was a Lowry.

She had her father's jaw.

I had not asked myself, until now, why a woman would sell her husband's child so cheap, or so fast.

I had known it was a lie when she walked up to the Teller's table.

I had stood there with a ballpoint pen lying across my palm, warm from her hand.

I had not been able to close my fingers.

The pen was still in my coat pocket.

I took it out in the dark and looked at it.

The end was chewed.

My wolf lifted his head.

I put the pen back.

When I came in at half past five the kitchen light was on, and the housekeeper stood at the stove with the coffee.