A week into my return, I woke before dawn without meaning to, the way I used to when I still lived inside a pack that expected its Luna up before anyone else. Old habits, apparently, didn't care that the pack in question had already discarded me. I lay in the gray half-light for a long moment, listening to the quiet of my own room, and realized I felt something I hadn't let myself feel yet since arriving home.
Restless.
Not the anxious, hollowed-out restlessness of those first days, the constant bracing for a blow that never came. Something closer to readiness. My body had spent a week resting, my mind had spent a week processing, and some steady, familiar part of me was beginning to ask what came next.
I found my father already awake when I made my way to the small dining room off his
