The Bound Wolf

Chapter 4

Cara's POV

The first week is strange in the way that silence is strange to someone who has only ever known noise used as a weapon.

She wakes every morning before the alarm. Old habit. She lies in the dark and waits for the sound of something going wrong, a voice raised, something broken, some signal that the day has already turned against her. The signals do not come. The house runs on its own rhythm. Penny starts breakfast at seven. Two groundskeepers arrive at seven thirty and do their work without being chased.

Cade leaves early and returns late. When he is home he works mostly from the room he calls the study. He passes her in the hallway sometimes and nods once. On day three he asks whether the filing system she built for the household accounts came from somewhere or whether she designed it herself. She says it is her own. He says it is better than what they had before and walks on.

She holds that for the rest of the day. Not because it is enormous but because she is not used to being noticed for something she did correctly.

Tate is a different matter.

She meets him on the second day when he comes to the house and finds her reorganizing the correspondence files in the study. He stands in the doorway with his arms folded and watches her the way someone watches a person they expect to make a mistake.

"You are the new house manager," he says.

"Yes," she says.

He looks at what she has done with the files. He says nothing, which Penny will later tell her means he found no fault with it.

Lily calls on day four.

"Your uncle rang me," Lily says, no greeting, because Lily never wastes time on greetings.

"What did he say?" Cara says.

"That you left Ethan's house."

"I did."

A pause. "Are you somewhere safe?"

"Yes."

"Are you certain?"

"Lily."

"I am asking because the last time you told me you were fine, you had two cracked ribs and a story about a training incident."

Cara goes quiet. That was sixteen months ago. She had called it training because calling it what it was would have required her to act, and she had not known how to act. She is still working out how.

"It is different here," she says.

"Different how."

"Quieter."

Lily makes a sound that means she is thinking. "I want to see you."

"All right."

"This weekend."

"All right."

After she hangs up she stands by her window with the phone against her chest and thinks about everything she has never told Lily. Lily knows the broad shape of it. She does not know the full inventory, because saying it out loud would make it real in a way that requires something to be done about it, and for years Cara has not known what to do.

On day six there is a box outside her door. No note. A plain brown box, flaps folded closed. She opens it.

Inside: three dresses, two pairs of trousers, four blouses, a set of sleepwear that is neither extravagant nor cheap, underwear that is new and correct, a pair of leather flats and a pair of trainers. All in her size. All correct.

She sits on the floor with the box on her lap and stays there for a while.

She is used to wearing things chosen for cost or convenience, never for the person wearing them. The specificity of this undoes something small and quiet inside her chest. She puts everything away in the wardrobe carefully, as though it might disappear if she moves too fast.

At dinner Cade is home before nine. They eat at the same long table at opposite ends. He reads something on his phone and she eats without speaking and the silence between them is not hostile. This is a kind of silence she is still learning to trust.

"The box," she says.

He looks up.

"Thank you," she says.

"The salary started day one," he says. "Consider it an advance on what you need."

He goes back to his phone.

She goes back to her food.

She is almost at her room when Penny catches her in the hall. Penny has the kind of face that cannot keep information in it for long.

"He rang around," Penny says, voice dropped. "Before you came. Three shops. He asked what sizes a woman your build in her mid-twenties might wear and then cross-checked it with what you had on at the meeting." Penny looks deeply satisfied with this. "Tate says he is being practical. I say Tate does not know everything."

Cara looks at her for a moment.

"Goodnight, Penny," she says.

She goes into her room and sits on the bed.

She thinks about a man who made three phone calls to get her dress size right. She thinks about seven years of wearing things that were cast-offs or hand-me-downs, chosen for function and never once for the person inside them.

She does not know what to do with this information yet. But something small and half-forgotten stirs underneath all that weight she has been carrying.

She is afraid of it.

She is also, for the first time in a long time, curious.

Her phone buzzes.

A number she does not recognize.

She answers without thinking.

The voice on the other end stops her completely.

"Cara," her uncle says. "We need to talk about the night your parents died."