Someone had hung string lights in the dead tree by the back fence, which I noticed before almost anything else, standing on the back patio of Fenrir Grey’s house holding a bottle of wine I wasn’t sure was the right kind, watching small white bulbs throw soft, unlikely light across a structure that had clearly spent a decade being ignored by everyone except, apparently, whoever Lark had hired to make a backyard look celebratory in under two weeks.
“They cleaned it up a little,” Wren said, following my gaze, Beck and Wendy trailing behind her with the specific loose, happy energy of people three drinks into an evening that hadn’t required them to drive.
“The treehouse thing. Lark mentioned it. Said it felt wrong having a party back here with it looking quote ‘like a crime scene.'”
“It looks nice,” I said, which was true, and also not at all what I felt looking at it, lit up like that, decorated for a celebration it had spent eleven years too neglected to host.
“You keep looking at it like it owes you money,” Beck said, not unkindly, already steering Wendy toward the drinks table with the easy confidence of a man who knew exactly where the good stuff would be hidden at any party, corporate or otherwise.
I didn’t have an answer for that I was willing to say out loud, so I didn’t try.
The house was full in a way it clearly hadn’t been in years, every room downstairs holding small, loud clusters of people — half my office, most of Lark’s friends, Tobias’s entire extended family, who had apparently shown up in force and immediately commandeered the kitchen, and Vesper Snow, resplendent in something gold and entirely impractical for standing near an open bar, holding court near the fireplace with the easy authority of a woman who considered herself the most important person in any room she chose to occupy.
“You again,” she said, intercepting me on my way past with a hand on my arm.
“Tell me. Has he kissed you yet?”
“Vesper.”
“It’s a simple question. I’ve known this family a long time. I can tell when something’s circling.” She studied my face with the same frank, unhurried appraisal she’d given me at the bar weeks earlier.
“You’ve got the look. The careful one. The look people get right before they do something brave and regret the timing forever.”
“There’s nothing to regret. We work together.”
“Mm,” she said, which I was beginning to suspect was a sound this entire family had inherited genetically, passed down specifically to make me feel transparent at the worst possible moments, and then she patted my arm, the same surprising-strength pat from before, and drifted off toward Iris, leaving me standing there with my pulse doing something complicated and no good way to explain it to myself.
Norwood found me in the kitchen twenty minutes later, expertly arranging a tray of something that looked, despite Lark’s warnings, genuinely excellent.
“You came back,” he said, not looking up from the tray.
“Lark insisted.”
“Lark insists on a great many things. It’s one of her more reliable qualities.” He finished the tray, stepped back to assess it with the critical eye of a man who took hors d’oeuvres more seriously than most people took their careers, and then looked at me directly, which he hadn’t done much of, the first visit.
“He’s different tonight. Lighter. I imagine you’ve noticed.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“I’ve worked in this house eleven years, Mr. Taylor. I watched that man grow up in it, after a fashion, and I have not seen him this unguarded at a party of his own hosting in longer than I’d care to admit out loud.” He picked up the tray, paused at the doorway.
“I find I’m rooting for whatever’s happening. For what that’s worth, coming from the staff.”
He was gone before I could ask him what, exactly, he thought was happening, which seemed, increasingly, to be the entire operating principle of every conversation in this house.
The toast happened around nine, Lark commandeering the center of the living room with the easy, magnetic confidence of someone who’d never once doubted a room would listen to her if she asked it to.
“I’m not going to make this long,” she said, glass raised, Tobias beside her looking simultaneously thrilled and faintly terrified, “because everyone here knows I have the attention span of a moth, but I do want to say one actual thing before we all go back to ignoring me in favor of the cheese table.”
Laughter, scattered, warm.
“My brother doesn’t do this.” She gestured at the room, the lights, the noise, the whole unlikely celebration filling a house that had clearly spent years being too quiet.
“He doesn’t host. He doesn’t let people in past the front hall, most days, and he has spent eleven years acting like this house is a museum he’s the sole, very tired curator of. So the fact that he opened the doors tonight, for me, for this — that’s not a small thing. That’s basically a parade, by Fenrir Grey standards.” Visit novelping.com for the full chapter.
Fenrir, across the room, raised his glass with the long-suffering, fond expression of a man who’d clearly weathered this exact kind of public affection from his sister more than once.
“When we were kids,” Lark went on, voice softening, “before he decided ‘Fenrir’ sounded more serious and made everyone start using it — don’t you dare laugh, Tobias, I will tell the ring story — I used to call him Finn.
Just Finn.
Easier for a five-year-old to yell across a yard, honestly.
And Finn was — ” she paused, something genuinely soft moving across her face, “Finn was the kind of kid who’d give you his whole afternoon without being asked twice.
I don’t think I’ve called him that in years.
But I wanted to, tonight, just once, because I think some of that kid’s still in there, somewhere underneath all the meetings and the museum-curating, and I’m glad — I’m so glad — that whatever’s been happening to him lately is bringing some of it back out.”
She raised her glass fully.
“To Finn. And to Fenrir. And to whoever’s responsible for the second one finally letting the first one out again.”
The room drank.
I did not.
I stood very still, glass halfway to my mouth, while something enormous and entirely formless tried to surface in my chest, a word, a name, a backyard, a ladder, a boy who used to give you his whole afternoon without being asked twice — and then Beck’s elbow found my ribs, laughing about something Tobias had said, Wendy’s voice rising over the noise, the whole warm chaos of the party closing back over the moment before I could finish whatever thought had been trying, desperately, to complete itself.
Finn.
I knew that name.
I knew it the way you know the smell of a house you haven’t visited in twenty years, instantly, bodily, before your conscious mind has caught up enough to explain why.
I didn’t get the chance to chase it any further, because Fenrir was suddenly beside me, glass in hand, eyes bright from the toast, from the wine, from whatever Lark had just cracked open in front of an entire room of witnesses.
“She does that,” he said, quiet, just for me, a small, embarrassed, genuinely happy smile tugging at one corner of his mouth.
“Drags out the old name. I haven’t heard it in years. I forgot how strange it feels, hearing it out loud.”
“Finn,” I said, testing it, watching his face for something I couldn’t yet name a reason to look for.
“Nobody’s called me that since I was about twelve.” Something flickered behind his eyes, brief, unguarded, gone before I could read it fully.
“There was someone. A long time ago. The only person who ever really used it like it belonged to me instead of like it was a joke.” He looked toward the window, toward the dark yard beyond it, the string-lit treehouse glowing faintly in the distance.
“I think about him more than I probably should, this time of year.”
The room tilted.
Or I did.
I genuinely couldn’t tell which.
“What happened to him?” I asked, voice steadier than I had any right to expect, given that my entire chest had become a single held breath. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
“I don’t actually know,” Fenrir said, quiet, almost too quiet for the noise around us.
“We moved, the summer I was twelve. Suddenly. My mother got sick that spring — the first time, before it got bad enough that everyone knew — and my father left not long after, and everything happened so fast I never got the chance to say goodbye to anyone. I’ve always wondered if he thought I left on purpose. If he thinks, all these years later, that I just stopped caring.” He looked back at me, and whatever was in his face then, I had no name sturdy enough to hold it.
“I used to think about going back. Finding him. Explaining. I never did. Cowardice, mostly. It’s easier to imagine someone’s forgiven you than to actually find out.”
I didn’t say anything.
I couldn’t.
Every word in my entire vocabulary had gone strange and useless in my mouth, and somewhere underneath the noise of the party, the toast, the string lights, the version of me that had spent eleven years building a blog around exactly this story, without ever once writing the boy’s real name, was standing very still in a stranger’s kitchen, finally, finally, starting to understand which wolf he’d actually been talking about the whole time.
“Clancy,” Fenrir said, gently, noticing, I think, that I’d gone somewhere far away from the room.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, the same lie I always told, except this time it came out thin enough that even I could hear how badly it was failing to hold.
He looked at me a moment longer, something searching and careful in his face, and then, mercifully, didn’t push, just touched my arm once, light, brief, and said, “Get some air if you need it. I’ll find you,” before Tobias’s uncle pulled him away toward the cheese table with some urgent question about wedding venues.
I found Wren and Beck on the back patio instead of taking the air alone, mostly because my legs carried me there before my brain had finished deciding where it wanted to go, and they both turned at the sound of the door, faces shifting the second they got a proper look at mine.
“Okay, what happened,” Wren said, no preamble, already reaching to take the wine glass out of my hand before I dropped it.
“You look like you saw the actual ghost this time, not the metaphorical one.”
“Nothing happened.”
“Clancy.” Beck’s voice had none of its usual easy humor in it, just plain, direct concern, the kind he rarely bothered with unless something genuinely warranted it.
“You went somewhere just now. We watched it happen from across the room. Lark gave her toast and you went white as a sheet and didn’t move for a full minute.”
I looked past them, out at the yard, at the treehouse glowing soft and strange under its borrowed lights, and thought about trying to explain it — the name, the ladder, the boy who used to give you his whole afternoon without being asked twice — and found I didn’t have anywhere near enough language built for it yet, not tonight, not standing in the cold with two of the people I trusted most in the world waiting patiently for an answer I wasn’t ready to give.
“I think I need to go home,” I said instead, which was true, even if it wasn’t the whole truth, and Wren, after a long beat of studying my face like she was deciding whether to push, finally just nodded and put an arm around my shoulders.
“Okay,” she said.
“We’ll tell Lark you weren’t feeling well. Nobody needs the details unless you want to give them.”
“Thank you.”
“You’ll tell us eventually,” Beck said, not as a question, just a quiet, steady certainty, the kind only an old friend gets to state out loud without it sounding like pressure.
“Whenever you’re ready. We’re not going anywhere.”
I let them walk me to the front gate, past the rose garden, the string lights still glowing warm against the dark, and looked back once at the house before I left it, every window lit, every room full of noise and people and a celebration that had no idea what it had just quietly, accidentally, completely undone in one small corner of the yard.
I walked the four blocks home slower than usual, turning Lark’s toast over and over, Finn, the kind of kid who’d give you his whole afternoon without being asked twice, and understood, somewhere around my own front door, exactly how long I’d been standing in a story I’d already written the ending to, eleven years ago, without ever once knowing I’d lived it.