chapter four
771 Words
SECRET IN THE WALLS:
My mother had a wooden box.
I had not thought about it in years, I had packed it down beneath everything else the way you pack down the things that hurt too much to examine in ordinary daylight. But being back in this house, in this room, in the particular quiet of a pack land night, brought it back up.
The box was in my bag. It had been in every bag I had ever packed since the night of the funeral, because I could not leave it behind and I could not bring myself to open it. It was roughly the size of a hardback novel, the wood dark and worn smooth at the corners, and it had a small brass lock that nobody had ever given me the key to.
I took it out and sat on the edge of my bed and held it.
There was a knock at my door.
"Come in," I said, expecting Mia.
It was Roger.
He stopped in the doorway when he saw the box. His whole body changed,not dramatically, but I had spent enough days now cataloguing the subtle vocabulary of him that I caught it. A slight tensing. A shift in his breathing.
"What is that?" he asked.
"My mother's." I watched him. "You recognise it."
It wasn't a question. He recognised it.
I could see it in the set of his shoulders, the careful way he didn't move.
"Roger."
My voice came out quieter than I intended.
"What do you know about this box?"
He crossed the room in four steps and sat on the chair by the window, which was the furthest point in the room from where I was sitting. I noticed that. I noticed the specific calculation of distance.
"Where did you get it?" he asked.
"It was in her things when she died. The solicitor gave it to me. There was no key." I ran my thumb along the lock. "It's always been locked. I've never opened it."
Something happened behind his eyes.
"Sera.."
"Don't say it isn't important."
"I wasn't going to."
I looked up at him. "Then what were you going to say?"
He was quiet for a long moment in that way that meant he was choosing between versions of the truth. I had learned that about him in the past week, that Roger was not a person who lied outright. He omitted. He delayed. He waited until he believed you were ready for a thing before he handed it to you.
I was running out of patience for being protected from information I was entitled to.
"There are things about your parents' deaths," he said finally, "that were not in the official record."
The room went very still.
"What things?" I asked.
"Not tonight." He said it and then saw my face and added, more quietly: "I need to verify something first. I need to be certain before I tell you, Sera, because once I tell you it changes everything and I cannot take it back."
I looked at him sitting there in the half-dark, with his secrets and his careful distance and the thing between us that neither of us had named out loud, and I felt something I had not expected to feel: sorrow. For him. For the weight that was clearly embedded in the architecture of his posture, for the years of whatever he had been carrying alone.
I put the box down on the bed beside me.
"Were they killed?" I asked.
He met my eyes.
"I believe so," he said.
The words landed in the quiet room and sat there.
I breathed.
"By Ashvale?" I asked.
"Possibly. The connection is, what I'm still working on." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Sera. The reason I brought you back...."
A howl cut through the night.
Not a pack howl, not the familiar sound of wolves running. This was sharp and short and urgent, the specific tone used for border incursion.
Roger was on his feet before it finished.
"Stay here," he said, and the command was wrapped in alpha authority, the kind that pressed against your instincts and made them want to comply.
I stood up.
He looked at me.
"Stay here," he said again, but softer. Just a request this time. Just a man asking.
I sat back down.
He went.
I sat with my mother's box in my lap and my father's best friend's secret settling over me like weather, and outside the howling continued, and the pack moved in the dark.
Sleep did not come for a very long time.
- Writer
