I ran my hand through the tall grass that grew along the road.
I wondered where I was going.
What I was doing.
How long it would take before I could breathe freely again without this weight on my chest.
How long it would take before my pack wasn’t so fractured anymore.
How long before Joe would talk to me again.
To any of us, really.
I wondered many things.
I stopped in front of my house.
My house. Not the one at the end of the lane.
I stared up at it.
I told myself to keep walking.
To go to the Bennetts. To stay there like I’d been doing for the past week.
I needed to check on them. To make sure they were okay. To make sure they had eaten something, at the very least. I couldn’t let the wolves go hungry.
So imagine my surprise when I found myself at my own front door, my hand hovering above the knob. I told myself to walk away.
I put my hand on the doorknob and twisted.
It didn’t move.
I didn’t understand.
And then I realized it was locked, and we never locked the door. Not even after my father left because we had no reason to. We lived in the country. The house at the end of the lane had been vacant, and then it had been inhabited by wolves. There had been no crime, there had been no monsters to come out of the forest at night.
Not before.
It was change and my hand shook with it.
I didn’t have my keys. I didn’t know where they were. I never needed—
We’ll put it here, my mother whispered. In case you ever need it.
The spare.
She’d put a spare key under the porch, hidden underneath a rock.
She’d shown me one day when I was nine. Maybe ten.
I was down the porch and reaching under it before I had another thought.
I couldn’t find the rock. Dead leaves and spiders, yes, but not the fucking rock—
My knuckles rapped against stone.
I pulled it out of the way. It fit in my hand the same way the one in the forest had. The one I’d struck Richard with. It—