Cara Ellery began coming to the farmhouse on Saturdays.
This was not, initially, by pack invitation. It was by her own decision, which the pack respected because the pack's general philosophy, refined over the years by Callum and maintained by everyone else, was that people should be allowed to make their own decisions about involvement and proximity. She came and asked questions, and the pack answered them, and she took notes in a small notebook she kept in her jacket pocket.
She had the particular quality of someone who will eventually write about something. Not out of malice — she didn't want to expose the pack — but because she was the kind of person who needed to understand things fully, and writing was how she understood them. She asked Petra questions about the biology. She asked Jin questions about the change and its aftermath. She asked Callum questions about the history of the Harrow, which was vast and complicated, and Callum answered them all with the patience of a man who has had a long time to think about what he would say if someone ever asked.
She and Marco (he had told her the name in March, the same week he'd told his mother) sat together in AP English and occasionally passed notes, not about Hartwell's relative attractiveness, but about liminal spaces and the way fiction handles transformation. The paper she eventually wrote for Hartwell at the end of the year was titled "The Wolf at the Door: Transformation as Identity in Gothic Literature" and received the highest mark in the class.
"You used Frankenstein," Marco said, reading it.
"The creature is the best-written character in English literature," she said. "Don't @ me."
"I think Jess said something very similar to me once."
"Smart friend."
He smiled. It was a smile that fit his face.