Outside the window, birds were busy weaving their nests in the morning light. The breeze was soft, the flowers were open, and everything outside looked exactly the way the world does when it doesn't know something heavy is coming.
Jeffrey called Julian, Lewis, and Adam into the study, and they were in there for most of the day. I didn't need anyone to tell me why. He was putting things in order.
I thought about everything she had set in motion the distance between Jeffrey and his grandsons, the fractures that had spread through the Hale pack and pulled the Sanders and the Blackwells into the wreckage alongside them. All of it traced back to one woman and a love that was never returned. Years of pain, engineered from a wound she never let heal. Jeffrey had spent so long holding the pack together through sheer will, with very little reason left to keep going.
