Chapter 14: The Grave

My father's grave was outside the pack cemetery wall.

Godfrey had decided that, the week Gordon died, and nobody had moved the stone.

I took Ronan there at dusk, after the pack had gone home and the hall lawn was empty.

We walked up the ridge path without talking.

The marker was a flat gray slab I had paid for myself, with his name and two dates.

Ronan stopped at the foot of it.

"I've never been here," he said.

"I know."

"I used to think I knew exactly what I would say to him."

He knelt in the wet grass in his good shirt.

I stood behind him with my hands in my father's pockets, one of them closed around the ultrasound print.

"Gordon," Ronan said.

His voice cracked on the second syllable, and he started again.

"I blamed you for six years for what my grandfather did. You carried it and you didn't say a word, and I let your daughter pay for it."

"She stood in front of the pack at twenty-three and signed her name to protect you. She never once asked me to be fair."

"I would give anything to have asked you one question while you were alive."

He put his palm flat on the stone.

"I can't bring you back. I can only tell you I know now."

He bent his head.

His shoulders began to shake, without a sound.

I had not seen him cry in two years, and not once at Joel's name.

I knelt beside him in the grass, and I put my arm around his back.

He turned into me and held on.

We stayed there until the light was gone and the first stars had come out over the ridge.

"Come down to the lake with me," I said into his hair.

He lifted his head.

"Clause two," he said hoarsely.

"I know what I wrote."

At the white fence post at the edge of Hazel's land, he stopped, the way he had stopped every dusk for two weeks.

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