SHADOWOFTHEPAST
1208 Words
JAX.
The wine was a good one.
I'd learned to appreciate the small things — a quiet house, a full glass, the particular stillness of an evening that hadn't yet demanded anything from me. I sat in the armchair by the window with my legs stretched out and let the silence settle around me like something earned.
The door opened.
Tyler filled the frame the way he always did now — too large for it, shoulders nearly touching both sides. Every time I looked at him I had to recalibrate. Somewhere between twelve and seventeen my son had become someone I had to look up at.
He kicked off his shoes without looking at them. "Coach says hey."
"Coach needs to mind his business."
The corner of Tyler's mouth twitched. He dropped his bag at the foot of the stairs.
"Dr. Hartley wants to meet with you. Tomorrow, if you can."
I kept my voice easy. "Your English teacher?"
"Yeah." He finally looked at me — just briefly, the way he'd been doing everything lately, like full eye contact cost something he wasn't sure he could afford. "I didn't do great on the last test."
"How great is not great?"
He paused for a few seconds before replying. "Sixty-one."
I said nothing. Just held his gaze.
He was the first to look away. "I'll do better."
"I know you will."
He lingered another second — and in that second, I saw the thing he wasn’t saying, the weight he carried like it was part of his body now. Then he turned and went upstairs, hand trailing the wall, footsteps heavy and slow.
I listened until his door clicked closed.
Then I set down my wine glass and let my head fall back against the chair.
Sixty-one.
A year ago Tyler had been pulling A-pluses without breaking a sweat. A year ago he'd been the kid teachers mentioned unprompted — your son is a pleasure, Mr. Cross, sharp instincts, great attitude. I used to sit with those words and feel something dangerously close to peace.
That was before January.
Before he'd come downstairs at three in the morning, shaking and wild-eyed, and I'd taken one look at him and known exactly what had happened.
I'd held him through it. Talked him down. Told him what he was, what we were, answered the questions he'd been too young to think to ask five years ago when I'd packed two bags and driven us both out of a life that would have swallowed him whole.
I'd thought I was protecting him.
We'd come here when he was twelve — left everything, the pack, the territory, the whole violent ecosystem of it — and for the first three years he'd been fine. Better than fine. He'd made friends, found basketball, and laughed easily.
I used to watch him at practice and think this was the right call, this was the right call like a man trying to convince himself mid-jump that the water below was deep enough.
But a first shift without a pack is a lonely thing.
Every young wolf deserves a community around them when it happens — elders who've been through it, wolves his own age going through it alongside him. Anchors. Context.
The reassurance that what's happening to his body isn't destruction, it's becoming.
Tyler had gotten me.
Just me, in a kitchen at three in the morning, doing my best.
I pressed two fingers to the bridge of my nose and breathed.
He was confused and unbalanced and trying to hide it because that's what I'd taught him — to keep the wolf quiet, keep his head down, blend in. I'd taught him that concealment was safety. Now I was watching him disappear inside it and I didn't know if the lesson was still the right one.
My eyes drifted to the wall.
She was grinning in the photo. Full and unguarded, the way Amara had always laughed — like she didn't see the point of doing it halfway. It had been taken the summer before Tyler was born, the two of us at the lake, and she'd turned to say something and I'd caught her mid-sentence and she'd looked so alive that I'd made it into a print the following week.
She'd complained about it. I look crazy, Jax. She'd kept straightening the frame every time she walked past it.
I hadn't moved it once in five years.
"Our son," I said quietly, "has grown into a very lovely boy." I paused. "I wish you were here to see it."
The room didn't answer. It never did. But there was something that happened when I talked to her — something in my chest that loosened, just slightly, like a knot that knew it wasn't going anywhere but could at least shift.
Amara had talked endlessly about watching Tyler grow up. What kind of man he'd become.
Whether he'd have her stubbornness or mine — both, she'd always concluded, God help whoever tries to argue with him.
She'd wanted to be there for the first shift, had been quietly preparing for it for years, reading everything, asking the pack elders questions, building a plan.
She never got to use it.
The rogues had come on a Tuesday.
I stopped the memory there.
Pressed it back behind the wall I'd built specifically to hold it. I was good at that — I'd had five years of practice — but sometimes it still found the gaps.
The particular sound of her voice in those last seconds.
The way she'd gripped my hand with what strength she had left, and the words she'd used on it.
Our son. Don't lose yourself in revenge. Our son.
She'd been three months pregnant and only I had known.
I'd buried that grief separately. Filed it somewhere so deep I'd almost stopped believing it was there.
I exhaled slowly.
She'd known me. Known that without that instruction, without her voice attached to it, I would have spent the rest of my life hunting every rogue that had been on our land that night until there was nothing left of me but the rage. She'd known, and she'd used her last breath to pull me back from it.
So I'd become a father instead of a weapon.
I'd picked Tyler up and I'd driven north and I'd built something quiet and ordinary and safe, and I'd told myself every day that it was enough, that it was what she would have wanted.
Now my son was struggling through his first year as a wolf with no one to guide him but a man still figuring out how to carry his own grief without dropping it on his child.
I reached for my wine glass again.
Tomorrow. One thing at a time.
First — this teacher. Dr. Hartley, Tyler had said. I'd meet her, nod in the right places, collect whatever strategies she had for helping Tyler academically, and be back home within the hour. I didn't doubt she meant well.
I just doubted very much that a human teacher, however dedicated, had any idea what was actually wrong with my son.
But I'd go. Because Tyler needed me to.
That had always been reason enough.
- Writer
