He told her on a Sunday in February, the kind of February Sunday that is technically still winter but smells like the edge of spring — cold but relenting, the light an hour longer than it had been a month ago.
He sat his mother down at the kitchen table with coffee and the particular deliberateness of someone who has been rehearsing.
"I need to tell you some things," he said. "There are two of them and they are separate, and I'd like to tell you one at a time."
Diane Vasquez looked at her child — at this young person who had her ex-husband's cheekbones and her own dark eyes and who was, she had been observing for four months, becoming someone she did not fully recognize yet, which was a thing she had been sitting with in the specific, patient way of someone who has decided that love is a practice and not a feeling. "Okay," she said.
"The first thing is: I'm a boy. Or I'm becoming one, or I've always been one and I'm just —" He breathed. "The pronouns are he and him. I'm going to be asking people to call me Mare for now, and later — there's a name I'm thinking about but I'm not ready yet. But the he and him. That part I'm sure of."
Diane was very still. Her hands were around her coffee cup, those strong careful hands.
"Okay," she said.
"That's — are you —"
"I need some time to think about this. And I'm going to have questions. And I'm going to get things wrong sometimes and I need you to correct me." She met his eyes. "But the first thing I want to say, before I say anything else: you are my child. All of you is my child. That does not change."
He had prepared, against his better judgment, for something harder than this. He had prepared for questions that started wrong and had to be redirected. He had prepared for his mother's face to do something that would hurt. He had not prepared for the simple, direct weight of: you are my child, and that does not change.
"Okay," he said, and his voice, low and steady, cracked at the end.
"What's the second thing?" Diane asked.
He took a breath. "The second thing is going to be harder to believe."
"Try me."
He told her about the wolf. The bite. The Backs. The pack. The transformations, the senses, the long runs under the full moon. He told her about Callum and the farmhouse and the bark tea and the stone in the clearing. He told her about Abuela already knowing, and he watched his mother's face do a complicated thing at that specific piece of information.
When he was done, the kitchen was quiet.
"Abuela knew," Diane said.
"Yes."
"For how long?"
"She said it was a family thing. She dreamed about a wolf."
Another silence. Diane got up and went to the cabinet above the coffee maker and took out the cloth bag of bark tea and stood looking at it. Then she turned around. "Your great-great-grandfather," she said. "Mateo Vasquez. My grandmother talked about him when I was small. She said he was 'the one who went to the forest and came back different.' I thought she was being poetic."
"He was Mateo by choice, Abuela says. He changed his name when the wolf — when the wolf helped him see who he was."
Diane looked at her son for a long time with an expression that was many things layered over each other, and then she put the bark tea back in the cabinet and sat back down. "I need you to take me to meet Callum," she said.
"Mom —"
"A man bit my child and my child is turning into a wolf," she said. "I would like to look him in the eye."
It was, he reflected, an extremely reasonable request.
"Yes," he said. "Okay."