Chapter 100: The Word

I finally let myself write the word I’ve been avoiding for months.

Mandi is finally asleep, worn out from crying. I leave the overhead light off and work by the small lamp on my desk instead, its glow pooling yellow over my notebook like something sacred. The rest of the room sits in shadow, and I’m grateful for it. Darkness feels honest tonight, like it’s been waiting as long as I have for this.

I’ve had the notebook open for a long time without writing anything. I just look at it, my pen hovering an inch above the page, the cap still on. My thoughts keep circling back to Mandi down the hall, to the way her breath finally evened out after an hour of shuddering, and I wonder how much longer I can keep doing this alone, holding all of it where she can’t see.

I find the page from weeks ago, the one split down the middle, SABOTAGE on the left and IMPOSSIBLE on the right. I tear it carefully from the spine, the sound loud in the quiet room, and lay it flat on my desk. Then I pull every loose page I’ve collected since, the ones I spread across my bed that one sleepless night, and I lay them down beside it, one after another, until the two columns sit at the center of weeks of evidence. My hands move with a kind of reverence, like I’m assembling something fragile that might fall apart if I rush.

I trace the lines of overlap with my finger, slow, the way you’d trace a route on a map you’ve driven so many times you could do it blind. Each line feels less like discovery now and more like confirmation, a truth I’d already half-known settling further into my bones.

Darcy. His name sits in both columns, same as it has for weeks, the ink darker where I circled it the first time. My finger stops there longer than anywhere else. I think of the way he looks at me sometimes, like he’s deciding how much of himself he can afford to let show, and my chest aches with something I don’t have a name for yet.

The twins. Bella’s amber eyes in the common room. Bianca’s claws in the mailroom hallway. Both of them avoiding me completely now, like I’ve become something to be managed instead of someone to know. I used to think we were becoming friends. Now I wonder if that was ever allowed to be true.

Puck. The hit into the boards that should have ended his night. The pen snapping in his fist. His skin, hot enough to leave a mark in my palm that lingered long after he let go. I remember how careless he seemed about hiding it, like some part of him wanted me to notice, to ask, to finally see him.

The forest. The clearing with the worn stone and the claw marks scored into it. The full moons, lined up neat against the dates in my notebook, every single strange night falling on or near one. I remember standing in that clearing and feeling, for the first time, like the forest was looking back at me.

The healing. Everyone here mends in days while my knee takes weeks to gain five degrees, while my therapist’s smile flickers and breaks the second I ask the wrong question out loud. I’ve stopped asking directly. I’ve learned to listen instead, to the pauses, to the things people don’t say.

The eyes. Gold, every time. Puck’s under a streetlamp. Bella’s in a common room. Bianca’s in a hallway. The wolf’s in a clearing, holding mine like it already knew me. I didn’t understand, that night, why I wasn’t afraid. I think I do now.

Dominic Valentine, Darcy’s brother, Puck’s victim. I add one final line beneath his name, slow, pressing hard enough to feel it through the page.

What really happened on that ice.

I sit back and look at the pencil sketch tucked into the corner of the page, the one I drew the night after the clearing, rough and unsteady, a wolf’s head with its ears tilted forward and its eyes shaded dark except for two careful circles of white paper left bare, meant to be gold. I remember my hand shaking as I drew it, how I’d told myself it was just a sketch, just an impression, nothing that meant anything. I look at Puck’s name, written and circled so many times across so many pages that the paper has worn thin there, nearly torn clean through. I think of how many nights I sat right here, convincing myself I was imagining things, building elaborate excuses just to avoid this exact moment.

And I look at the word.

It’s scattered through the notebook in half a dozen places, written small, written in the margins, written and then scratched out so hard the pen tore the page. I find each instance now and lay my finger over it. Every time I came close. Every time I pulled back. Every time fear won out over certainty.

I pick up my pen.

My hand is steady. That surprises me, somehow, after everything, after the clearing and the hallway and Mandi’s throat closing around a sentence she couldn’t finish. I expect my hand to shake. It doesn’t. Maybe this is what it feels like when you finally stop fighting something true.

I write it at the bottom of the page, in letters larger than anything else on it.

Werewolf.

This time I don’t cross it out.

I sit there and look at the word until it stops looking strange. It takes longer than I expect, and then, all at once, it doesn’t look strange at all. It looks like the only word that fits, the one piece I’ve been leaving blank in a puzzle that’s been finished around it for weeks. Relief comes first, surprising in its intensity, followed almost immediately by something heavier, something closer to grief for the version of my life where none of this was real.

I look at the pencil sketch again, at the two careful circles of gold I left bare in the center of the wolf’s eyes, and something settles into place behind my ribs, heavy and certain. I think of everyone whose name fills these pages, and for the first time, I let myself feel the full weight of what that means, not just for me, but for all of them, living lives twisted around a secret this large.

"It’s not just him," I whisper, my fingers pressing flat against the page like I could hold the truth down by force. "It’s all of them."

Outside my window, faint and far off, carried on the cold night air from somewhere deep in Rosethorn Forest, a wolf howls.

I don’t flinch. My hand stays flat on the page, my shoulders loose.

I used to flinch. I remember the first time I heard it, lying awake in this same bed, convincing myself it was coyotes because that was so much easier than the alternative. I remember every time since, the way my whole body used to go tight and still at the sound of it, how my breath would catch somewhere behind my sternum and refuse to let go until the sound faded. I remember pulling the blanket higher, pretending sleep would come if I just lay still enough.

Tonight I just listen.

The howl rises, long and low, and I sit at my desk with my notebook open in front of me and my pencil sketch of golden eyes catching the lamplight, and I let the sound wash over me instead of away from me. It doesn’t feel like a warning anymore. It doesn’t feel like something I need to explain away or write down or file into a column. For the first time in months, I feel something close to peace, fragile and new, but real.

It just feels like the truth, finally, saying itself out loud.