Three weeks.
That was how long it took for the pack house to decide that whatever had happened during the Harvest Gathering was finished, filed away, no longer worth the energy of discussion. Three weeks for the corridors to go back to their ordinary sounds and the dining room to go back to its ordinary rhythms and the faces of the senior pack members to stop carrying that particular knowing quality they had worn in the days immediately following the summit.
Three weeks for everyone to go back to looking through me.
I noticed the moment it happened. A Tuesday morning, the kind of grey and unremarkable Tuesday that October produced in quantity, when I carried the breakfast service through the dining room and not a single head turned. Not with the calculating awareness of the summit week
