The Nameless Luna novel · Chapter 13 of 32

Chapter 13: Annalise

The wind came off the lake and pushed her hair across her face.

"Say that again," I said.

"Elden told me to take your name. A week after I got to Anchorage."

"You told everyone Mom picked it for you."

"She did pick it for me. She just gave it to you."

She looked back at the office window.

"Not here. Dad tells Elden everything."

Her teeth were starting to go.

I unzipped my flight jacket and held it out.

She stared at it, then put it on and pulled the short cuffs down over her hands.

Warrick saw us walk to the end of the next pier, behind the fuel shed, and stayed with the Otter.

She sat on an upturned bucket. I stayed standing.

"Do you know what Fairbanks was like?" she said.

"Nobody ever told me."

"Nobody ever asked."

She pulled her knees up inside my jacket.

"They were rogues. No pack would have them. We lived in a trailer off the Steese Highway with foil on the windows."

"When I was nine, she left me at a gas station for two days to see if I'd find my own way home."

"Did you?"

"I walked eleven miles. She was asleep."

She said it flatly.

"They were both dead by the time I was sixteen. I slept in the back room of a laundromat until the DNA test."

The year I was seventeen, I'd flown the Tennant Beaver into Fairbanks every month.

I'd probably flown right over that laundromat.

"No pack," I said. "So no roll."

"No name in any book. I'd never felt a pack in my life."

She looked up at me.

"You know what that's like now."

"Since I was eighteen."

"Since I was born."

"Then Anchorage," she said. "Everyone called me sweetheart, and I still couldn't feel them."

"And Elden came for dinner. He was twenty-three. He brought flowers for Mom."

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