Chapter 18: What My Father Wrote

Costa's POV

Cairnfell hall held two hundred when it was full, and by dark it was full.

They stood along the stone walls and sat on the benches and crowded the doorway.

Some were men who had carried my father's coffin.

I stood at the long table with the blue book in front of me.

Willa sat at the very back, against the wall, with her hands between her knees.

She hadn't asked to come. She had walked in behind me and sat down.

I could feel her there the way I felt the cold.

"You called us for a reason," said the old driver.

He was the oldest man in the hall, and he had driven my father for thirty years.

"Say it."

"I'm going to read you something," I said. "I want you to hear every line before you speak."

I opened the book.

I read the first line, and the second.

I read the dates, and the sums, and the initials.

By the tenth line there was no sound in the room but my voice and the fire.

By the twentieth, a woman near the front put her hand to her mouth.

"That's my sister's name," she said.

I stopped.

"Twelve years ago, she went to work for a family on the coast."

"She never wrote."

"I know," I said. "She's on the sixth page."

Nobody moved.

"That is a lie," the old driver said.

He had stood up so fast the bench scraped.

"That is not our old Alpha's hand."

"He was a hard man and a fair one, and I'll not hear you slander the dead in his own hall."

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