Page 12 of Harvest Moon

“Yeah...” If only that help wasn’t taking him far away. All this time apart, he’d been in the back of my head. I thought I’d be able to come back here, and things would be like they used to be.

But they weren’t. I’d been gone too long, and now everything had changed and there wasn’t a spot for me to fit in anymore.

“Hon, he isn’t dead,” Ma said gently. The thought alone sent a shiver up my spine. “Give him a call. Talk to him. Bet he’d like that. He’s been asking about you, you know? When we saw his family at the grocery store or about town. He always wanted to know how you were holding up.”

And sure, we’d texted some, but things just weren’t the same when you weren’t together. Without his open face, his keen attention, I’d never known what to say.

Once, I’d thought we’d get married. I’d let Ma go to town on those magazines of hers and plan the whole thing. Thank god people liked to have weddings in barns now. They could be right pretty when you strung up lights, and Ma used to have the nicest flower garden.

That’d dried up, too, in the years I’d been gone.

Maybe if I hadn’t gone to school at all, the farm would still be up and running. I’d have a future, a man at my side who didn’t think I was a good for nothing shirk who disappeared and left his family in the lurch. I’d have something to show for myself.

“Ma,” I whispered, sitting straight all the sudden, reaching over and grabbing her hand out of her lap. “Lots of people lately have had luck raising money online. They call it crowdfunding. It takes a bit of time, but if you could give it to me—just three months, I could get everything figured out. Raise the money. Keep the farm and get it back in working condition.”

Pa might call the shots around here, but I knew, if Ma pushed him, he’d break down. Far as I could tell, it often worked like that when an alpha loved an omega. It was hard to let them down, cause them harm, give them anything but the best of all you had.

But Ma’s face had fallen, her sympathy shuttered off, and my heart sank.

“Sweetheart, the deal is done. This is happening, but it’s gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay.”

She went back to combing her fingers through my hair, but it was no damn good. I wanted to howl my frustration out to the sky, but then every wolf in the Henderson pack would know I was losing my mind. Alexis’s ma would hear from clear across the fields and get a little secret smile for all my trouble.

“You’ve got your degree,” Ma reminded me, as if that hadn’t caused all these problems. “Plenty of experience. You can get a job on one of those big farms. I hear once you work your way up the ladder a bit, the pay’s good. And your pa and I aren’t going to set you off into the world with nothing to your name.”

No, they’d just let everything crumble the very moment I got home.

Or, well, they’d let it crumble over years. Looking around, I had to admit it’d been happening for a while. And maybe it wasn’t all their fault, maybe this wasn’t even my Pa trying to punish me for disobeying him, but I wasn’t ready to be at peace with it. Not yet—maybe not ever.

For near half of my life, I’d imagined living on this farm, working the land with my own hands, providing for my pack and my husband—for Alexis. I’d picked out a spot on the far side of the field, against the trees, where I could build a house that was practically as close to his parents as to mine. It’d be a little house, to start, but we could add on if he wanted children or a dog. I’d thought about a chicken coop—how fresh eggs might make a good breakfast before he went trekking in the wilderness. How on my days off, I’d follow him out there, and we’d run in our furs together.

It’d all been charming, been perfect, and now, I couldn’t imagine it even in my head. It was like the whole thing had crumbled in my hands, and without the things I’d counted on these past five years, I couldn’t see any path forward for myself.

“Sweetie, not all’s lost. I talked to Mrs. Rose today at the market, and she said her son’s looking for a roommate. Just moved downtown. You went to school with him, right? Got along? I got his number inside.”

“Okay.” There was nothing wrong with Patrick Rose—a beta wolf, and something of a cut up, but it wasn’t like anybody’d be someone I wanted to be around right then.

Ma cupped my cheek, turned my head so I had to look at her, and smiled with all the hope she could muster. “You’ll find your feet, and once Alexis has a chance to get settled in, you should call him, at least to check in on Claudia, hm?”

“Sure.” But I leaned back to stare out across the fields, out at the spot under the trees where I’d never build that house. Past them, where the dust kicked up from Birch’s car lingered in the air, and Alexis sped away to find a path that wasn’t mine.

Ma didn’t understand. I wanted to give Alexis the world, and I didn’t even have a tiny sliver of it to call my own anymore.

7

Alexis

Iglanced back through the rear window. Not toward my house, but beyond it, to the patch of woods that led to Ridge’s family farm. It was silly. I could go back anytime. I could turn around and go back right that minute.

But for some reason, it felt like I was seeing it for the last time. Like something was changing irrevocably. Breaking.

My damned useless heart, maybe.

“Forget something?” Birch asked from the front seat, turning back to look at me with concern. “We can go back. It’s no trouble.”

He really was the best. A good man, worthy of my cousin.

And Claudia, like the mind reader she was, reached out and grabbed his hand. “He’s fine, honey. He’s lived in that house his whole life is all. It’s a big change.”

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