Page 45 of Pack Kasen: Part 2

When it looked like he was getting ready to punch Aren again, even after Aren warned him that he only got one hit, I’d made my presence known.

It’s a weird thing to have people fight for you when, for years, you’ve had to fight for yourself.

It had felt good.

Strange, but good.

“Ours isn’t so fancy,” he says, looking at the bunkhouse that resembles a horse stable on the outside, but inside is like a farmhouse with bedrooms, a couple of communal kitchens, living rooms, and bathrooms. “I don’t think Aren was happy about you staying in the bunkhouse.”

He wasn’t, but I’d needed to be close to my dad. We slept in adjoining rooms, but just knowing my dad was in the room next to mine with a single wall separating us was unreal.

“He has a lot of wrongs to right.” I look at my dad. “And I refuse to make it easy for him.”

He grins at me. “Ah, there it is.”

I scrunch my nose. “There is what?”

“The Prairie stubbornness.”

“The what?”

“Your great-great-grandmother was the first who showed signs of it. Nothing can ever defeat the Prairie stubbornness.”

I smile. “It sounds like I have a lot to learn.”

His smile fades. “Will you tell me what happened?”

I shrug, feigning casualness. “There isn’t much to say.”

“We’re also very good at hiding when we’re in pain,” he says, watching me closely. “Something tells me you’ve been doing a lot of hurting.”

I chew the inside of my cheek as I debate how much to tell him. “There’s a lot that happened. Some I don’t remember.” Like how I wound up in the basement. Mom was sick. I remember that, but I don’t know why her being sick and then dying led to me living in the basement.

But it was my fault.

Whatever happened to her was my fault.

“There was another man,” I explain, carefully choosing my words as uncertainty lingers. “I thought he was my dad."

He slowly nods. “Did he take you from us?”

I reach into my memories, search for the answer, and… “I don’t know.”

He draws me against his chest, and I breathe in the scent of his skin. Raw leather and sweet licorice, and the very faint smell of sunflowers that make my eyes prickle with tears. “It’s okay, Kata. We have each other again. That’s all that matters for now.”

The man who kept me in the basement wasn’t my dad. I think I knew it at the time, but didn’t want to believe it. Even if I did something wrong, I didn’t deserve to live in the basement. I was just a child.

I clear my throat. “It wasn’t Kat before. I chose it. Kat Meadow. I went to the county court and said I wanted a new name and filled in so many forms, and that name felt like me. I didn’t understand until now.”

The resemblance between the name I picked for myself and Kataleya Prairie is too close not to notice.

He cradles the back of my head, smiling. “Our Kataleya Prairie became Kat Meadow. You might have memory gaps, but I think a part of you remembered who you once were.”

“So what happens now?”

“Now, we go home. Your mom would want to see you. And your little sister.”

My heart twists. “Mom and a sister?”

---