Chapter 16: Not Forgiven

Gray went down first.

He did not stagger or fall.

He walked out of the line of pack men, stopped in the gravel in front of me, and knelt on both knees with his big hands flat on his thighs.

"I set the snare," he said.

His voice carried the way it did when he gave orders, and it shook the whole way through.

"Dad gave me a drawing and said it would catch your ankle and hold you till someone found you."

"A stumble, he said. A few feet."

"I never walked the drop. I should have walked the drop."

"It was forty feet," I said.

"I know that now."

"You know it because Eli told you."

"Yes." He lifted his head, and his eyes were wet and red. "I'm not asking you to say it's all right."

"Good."

"I'm asking you to hit me, if you want to."

I looked at his face, the one that had carried me out of the creek when I was seven.

I thought about the hours I had spent on that ledge with a wire around my ankle.

"I don't want to hit you," I said. "I want you to tell the rest."

He nodded.

He told it plainly, and the pack listened.

The three of them had read my moods over Sunday dinner and passed them around the link afterward, where I could not hear.

"Opal ran it," Gray said. "She'd say what you'd probably do. She was nearly always right."

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