Chapter 13: Not in Any Life

Dahlia stepped out of my cabin with my knife in her pocket and stopped on the porch.

I stopped breathing.

She stood three feet above my head, in Bram's coat, and looked out over the yard.

Her wolf hearing would catch a heartbeat.

So I forced mine to slow.

I thought of a greenhouse in winter, and glass, and nothing moving.

She sniffed once and tilted her head.

"Keeva?" she said, very quietly. "Come out, sweet girl. It's only me."

I did not move.

She waited the length of ten slow breaths.

Then she went down the steps and crossed the yard toward the farmhouse next door, the coat swinging at her knees.

She did not glance back.

At her own door she slipped the dark glasses out of the pocket and put them on.

The soft, sad little hunch came back into her shoulders.

Then she went inside, and a lamp came on, and the blind girl was home.

I stayed behind the woodpile until my feet had gone numb.

I had it all.

Her face, her eyes, her real voice, and the sentence about blame.

I stopped the recording and saved it twice, once to the phone and once to the cloud account I had opened in a library the week before.

Then I crept back inside and looked at the table.

The new belt lay coiled beside the place where my knife had been.

I did not touch it.

I took a dish towel off the hook and flipped the belt into it with a spoon, and my eyes burned from the fumes.

Boots pounded across the fields.

I grabbed the stove poker, and then I smelled him, and my knees nearly gave out.

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