KAEL

She left on a Tuesday.

Marcus drove her. I stood at the window of my study and watched the car pull away and felt the bond stretch thin between us, thinning and thinning until it was a constant, low-grade ache lodged between my ribs. Not severing — it would never sever without rejection or death — but attenuating, becoming the kind of pain you learned to live with because the alternative was feeling nothing.

The pack house went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with noise levels. ...