Garth Ellery came too.
He stood in the farmhouse kitchen with the manner of a man entering a place he knows well but has not been in for some time, which was the case: Callum told Mare afterward that Garth Ellery had stood in that same kitchen twenty years ago, when Callum's predecessor had called a meeting to renegotiate, and they had come to their agreement over coffee and preserved plum cake.
They were old enemies in the way that is more honestly called old acquaintances who had chosen to be careful with each other. Something in Callum loosened when Ellery walked in — not warmly, but with the ease of a situation that had been tense becoming merely complex.
Cara stood next to her grandfather and looked around the farmhouse with the expression of someone who has been waiting to see something for a long time and is now organizing what they see against what they expected. She was steady. She was paying attention.
"Callum," Ellery said.
"Garth." Callum didn't stand. He sat by the fire, as he always sat by the fire. "You didn't have to come."
"She's my granddaughter." Ellery's voice was level. "I'm not sending her into a wolf pack alone."
"She'd have been safe."
"I know she'd have been safe. I still came." He looked at Mare. "The message was delivered."
"Yes," Mare said. "It was."
Cara was looking at Mare with the same direct attention she'd had in the AP English classroom, and now she said: "What happened to you? In October?"
The pack looked at Callum. Callum looked at Mare.
Mare thought about the three options they'd discussed. He thought about what it meant to choose. He thought about Callum, who had given him the choice to know or not know, and what it had meant to have that choice.
"I was bitten," he said. "And the bite changed me. And some of the changes were about the wolf. And some of them were already in me." He held her gaze. "I'm not who I was in September. I'm more than who I was in September." A pause. "And I'm going to tell you all of it, if you want. But you should know — once you know, you can't unknow. And my grandfather's policy was to not talk about this, and he had his reasons."
Ellery, across the room, made no sound.
Cara looked at her grandfather.
"It's your choice," Ellery said quietly.
"Then yes," she said, turning back to Mare. "I want to know."
They talked for four hours. Petra made more of the barky tea. Luka, because he was Luka, made sandwiches that nobody had asked for but everyone ate. Cara asked questions with the same careful precision she put into everything, and the pack answered them with varying degrees of completeness based on the question's complexity and their individual comfort with disclosure. Garth Ellery sat in the corner with his coffee and said almost nothing, but watched with the particular attention of a man who has been waiting for something to resolve.
At the end of it, Cara looked at Mare and said: "Your great-great-grandmother. Mateo. I've been in the county historical society's archives. There's a Vasquez family record from the 1930s with a name change. I didn't know what to make of it."
Mare felt something move through him — not surprise, not quite, but something older than surprise. Recognition. "You found that."
"I didn't know what I was looking for. I was just following the Backs." She paused. "It makes more sense now."
Callum, by the fire, said: "The Vasquez line and the Ellery line have been circling this story for a hundred years." He looked at both of them. "I think we're in the chapter where it resolves."
Petra said: "Please don't."
"What?"
"Go prophetic. Not today."
Luka laughed. The tension in the room completed its long process of becoming something less like tension and more like weather.