My Family Forgot I Existed, So I Left Them Behind novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Man Who Remembered

Torin picks her up at the highway shelter, gives her one term, and shows her the Council notice saying Rhys Harlan has one child.

I stopped walking in the middle of the road.

*Who is this?* I sent back into the link.

*Torin Brask,* the voice said. *Alpha of Brask Ridge. Stay where you are, Imogen. I'm in the truck.*

I had never heard that voice in my life, and it knew my name.

*How do you know me?*

*I'll answer that to your face. Is there a place near you with a roof?*

There was a bus shelter a mile down the county road, and I told him so.

*Walk to it. Keep moving. You're losing heat.*

*You can't tell me what to do.*

*No,* he said. *I'm asking.*

Nobody had asked me anything in three months, so I walked.

The shelter was a metal frame with one cracked bench and a timetable that stopped in September.

My phone said six percent.

I sat down and pulled my sister's coat tight, and it still smelled like her.

I took it off and folded it on the bench.

I was colder without it, and that was fine.

Twenty minutes later a black truck came down the road with its headlights on high and stopped at the curb.

The man who got out was taller than the truck door.

He wore a black wool coat, and snow stuck to his shoulders.

A scar ran through his left eyebrow, and his eyes were the color of wet slate.

He stopped six feet away and did not come closer.

"Imogen Harlan," he said.

Out loud his voice was lower than it had been in my head.

"You've never met me," I said. "Say how you know my name."

"I know your name because I felt it go quiet."

"That isn't an answer."

"It is the whole answer." He took a breath. "Three months ago I was in my kitchen, and a door in my head I never knew was there slammed shut. Nobody has your link now. Not your father, not your mother. I've been able to hear that something is missing and nothing else."

"And tonight?"

"Tonight you opened it. You were angry enough that you called everyone, and I was the only one who heard."

I looked at his hands.

They were empty, and he kept them open at his sides.

"What are you?" I asked.

"Your mate, if you want it." He said it flatly, with no flourish. "I've known since the first time I felt you through the pack lines, two years ago at the Council gathering. You were across the hall in a green dress, and you didn't see me."

"I would remember a green dress."

"You were talking to the caterer about ice."

That was true.

I had spent that whole gathering arguing with a caterer about ice.

My throat closed up.

"You can't just say that," I whispered. "Three hours ago my mother asked me if we'd met."

"I know."

"How do you know?"

He held out his phone.

On the screen was the live feed, paused on my father's face when I walked in, and under it a comment from the account of a Brask Ridge warrior: *Is that the Harlan girl?*

"My people were watching," he said. "I was driving before the video finished."

I pushed my hair back with a hand that wouldn't hold still.

"I'm going to give you one term," Torin said. "I want it understood before I put you in my truck."

"Go on."

"You say no, and I put you wherever you want to go. A hotel, a friend, a bus out of the state. I pay for it and I never mention it again." His jaw moved. "You say yes, you say it once, out loud, and it is yes the whole way. I won't take a half-yes from you. I won't take anything you haven't said."

"I haven't said anything."

"Then I haven't touched you."

I wanted to laugh, and I wanted to cry.

I did neither.

"What happens in the morning?" I asked.

"You eat. You sleep in a room with a lock on the inside. My healer looks at you."

"And my family?"

Torin was quiet for a second.

"There's something you need to see first," he said.

He swiped the screen and handed me the phone.

It was a scanned document, a single page on Moon Council letterhead.

*NOTICE OF HOUSEHOLD,* it said at the top. *Harlan Ridge Pack.*

I read the first line, and then I read it again.

*Alpha Rhys Harlan declares his household to be himself, his mate Beatrice, and one child, Odette.*

At the bottom, in my father's blocky signature, was a date.

It was the morning after the fight.

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