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I was also now the proud owner of a pair of crutches, which at least meant that I wasn’t putting weight on my knee. That was good for my knee, and not-so-good for my armpits. I’d been on the damn things for twenty minutes and I already hated them.

Hart had dropped me back at the house along with Sassafras—who we had brought back to the hotel with us. I’d insisted on getting her a cat-carrier instead of using the backpack, although her yowls suggested it didn’t much matter to her which zip-up containment system I chose, she hated them all.

Elliot was going to come up to join me at the house, and Hart was going to go back to harassing the Sheriff’s Department.

He’d babbled something about injunctions, warrants, and court orders, and also kicking somebody’s ass as he helped me navigate the stairs and avoid my mother’s bloodstain on the porch.

God, I hated this house. The house, my parents—both of them—the Sheriff’s Department, the Community… the whole fucking mess.

I awkwardly fed Sassafras and set out water, then tried to decide whether I hated the idea of sitting at the kitchen table, on my parents’ bed, or going upstairs to my own old room more.

I ended up deciding on the kitchen, because the idea of going up the stairs was deeply unpleasant and sitting on my parents’ bed felt wrong . Which left the kitchen or the sitting room, and I had too many negative associations with the sitting room.

We didn’t have a living or family room in the way most households apparently did.

A room like the one Elliot had with a comfy couch, a TV, coffee table, reclining armchair.

Every guy I’d ever lived with had a room like that, too.

And the tiny apartment that Hands and Paws had set Noah up with when we’d first moved in together had also had one—since their apartments came furnished—which is the only reason I knew they were the norm.

What we’d had growing up was a room with stiff formal furniture—straight-backed chairs with barely-there cushions arranged around a coffee table that had started life as a kitchen table, but had its legs sawed off so that it was low. The single house-phone was on an end table in a corner.

The only part of the room I liked was the wood stove, which I remembered huddling near with Noah on cold winter days as snow came down outside after Momma had marched us out through the drifts to help with the goats and chickens.

If Father had to go down to the Community village, Momma would sometimes make us warm milk sweetened with honey and spiced with cinnamon.

Most kids would have gotten hot cocoa, but our house had never had cocoa powder, much less chocolate or hot cocoa mix.

Given that it was currently in the low-nineties at midmorning, I wasn’t about to start a fire, and the chairs in the kitchen were honestly more comfortable than the ones in the sitting room, so I settled awkwardly at the table.

I pulled out my laptop and started to type in the list of things Elliot and I had catalogued, since I couldn’t really do anything else.

My parents didn’t have internet—no shock there, given that we’d only gotten a basic landline phone once Noah and I were old enough to walk places on our own, and Momma had argued that if something happened to us, we should have a way to call them.

It had taken her months of persuading. Begging. Pleading.

The phone was rarely used, and my father had ripped it out of the wall more than once when a telemarketer or robocall rang the house. I glanced down at the phone sitting next to my laptop, checking to see if Elliot had sent a text. He hadn’t.

I sighed and kept typing.

“Mew!”

I looked up at the cat, who had sat herself down on the rug in front of the sink, tail curled around her front paws.

“What?” I asked her.

“Mrow.”

“You have food. And water.”

“Mrrrrowl.”

Litter. Shit. Literally, I suppose, if I didn’t figure out an alternative solution.

I pushed myself up, hobbling on my crutches over to the sink, under which my mother had always kept a large basin.

Sassafras moved away from the danger of the metal crutches.

The basin was still there. I pulled it out, awkwardly leaning on the counter, trying to balance my crutches.

I dropped one of them, but managed not to fall over, at least.

Now I needed something to put in the basin.

An extremely slow, awkward, and painful sojourn to the barn later, and I had a half-bag of sand that would normally have been used to provide grip on an icy driveway or porch.

“Meerow!”

“Yeah, yeah, give me a second.”

Struggling, I poured sand on the floor before adjusting and getting it into the basin, which I was at least smart enough to have put on the floor before trying to pour sand into it. Sassafras approached the sand on the floor cautiously, then sniffed at it.

“Don’t even think about it,” I told her. “You use the sand in the box, not on the floor. Got it?”

“Mrrp.” She pawed a little at the sand.

“No, stop that.”

She looked up at me. I finished pouring, then used a crutch to scuff the sand she’d been sniffing.

“Use the box,” I told her.

She sniffed at it tentatively, then delicately stepped in, turned around once, still sniffing, then turned her back to me and squatted.

“Glad that works for you,” I muttered, turning around and making my slow way back to the kitchen table.

With nothing better to do once I’d finished typing out the list of things we’d catalogued, I started re-reading it, thinking about things I thought should be here or anything that shouldn’t have been in the house I’d known growing up.

The two upstairs bedrooms—which had been Noah’s and mine—were the most different from what I remembered.

Mine had clearly been converted to storage, the bed frame dismantled and tucked in a corner, accumulating cobwebs.

The mattress, never particularly comfortable, had been rolled up and tied in a spiral like an inedible Swiss Roll.

I’d loved those before alpha-gal stole my ability to eat anything that included cream filling.

Boxes had been stacked around the room, although I wasn’t sure what was in them—I hadn’t wanted to open up anything sealed with tape or twine.

Maybe our old clothes or drawings we made if Father hadn’t made Momma destroy them, maybe some of Momma’s things from before she married Father.

The other room, Noah’s, appeared to have been given to the sister we’d never known—Rachael.

It had contained one of the few toys that we’d been allowed—a baby doll, presumably given to Noah so that he’d play-act as his future role of mother.

I’d been given a small plastic work-bench set, which I’d played with as often as play had been permitted.

Noah hadn’t been particularly interested in that, either, choosing instead to draw or paint or play in the mud making sculptures out of mud and sticks and stones.

We’d each had a teddy bear, as well—Noah’s a dark brown, mine more sandy-colored, but I didn’t see either one out anywhere.

Rachael’s room—what had been Noah’s—had been updated with delicate floral wallpaper and her bed had two pink pillows and a well-loved stuffed sheep, with a small rocking chair in the corner with a pale pink crocheted afghan folded over the arm and the doll arranged as though it were sitting.

It was definitely more luxury than either Noah or I had growing up.

I wondered if it was because my parents had some amount of regret about the way they’d treated us.

Or maybe they just thought that harsh treatment was fine for boys, and blamed that for Noah being Noah.

I knew Father thought women were weaker and more susceptible to both emotions and desires—so maybe they’d given Rachael more things—pillows, blankets, the stuffed sheep—to make sure that she stayed she .

I had no evidence either way, but it made me wonder what made Rachael more lovable than me or Noah. Given that she was dead, I’d never know.

A scratching from the back of the house pulled my attention away from that dark line of contemplation, and I frowned, my pulse picking up.

It could be an animal—maybe another cat? Or it could be my father in wolf form.

Or Elliot, as a badger.

Two of those possibilities were definitely good reasons to go open the door. It was the middle one that had me worried.

The scratching came again.

I heaved myself up and crutched my way to the back door. I stopped on my side of it, and the scratching happened again, more urgent, accompanied by a familiar low grunting.

I opened the door, and an absolutely filthy badger-Elliot shuffled his way inside, dragging mud, leaves, and other forest detritus with him.

“You just clawed the shit out of the door,” I told him, and he looked back over one furry shoulder with a grunt and expression that clearly said Like you give a fuck .

He wasn’t wrong.

I’d brought him a couple changes of clothes, which I left on the bathroom counter while Elliot showered off the mud.

I briefly contemplated cleaning up the floor, but decided that the logistics of trying to sweep or mop while on crutches was going to be too complicated.

There was also part of me that rather enjoyed the idea of not cleaning up as an act of admittedly childish spite.

I was back in the kitchen when Elliot came out and found me, padding out of the bathroom barefoot, wearing a pair of khaki cargo shorts and a grey t-shirt that read ‘Carpenters love hard wood’ with a stylized plank below. Hart had given it to him at some point.

I was about to say something, but Elliot crossed the kitchen, grabbed my face, and kissed me, his tongue possessive and grip strong.

My hands closed around his forearms, the warmth of his skin under my palms reassuring, grounding.

I kissed him back, still a little desperate to hold onto him in the wake of the accident.