"You were always there," I say. Not a question.
Always, it says.
"Then why—"
The answer comes before I finish asking.
Not in words — it never uses words exactly, it uses something more direct than words, something that bypasses the part of the mind that translates and goes straight to understanding.
What it gives me is this: a sense of waiting. Of something enormous holding itself still because the conditions were not right. Of a thing that knew its own timing and could not be hurried regardless of how much the person carrying it needed it to be.
I think about eighteen years of being the wrong one. The lesser one. The wolfless one.
You were never lesser, it says. And the certainty of it — the absolute, immovable certainty, like bedrock, like something that has been true since before I was born and will be true after I am gone — undoes something in me that I have been holding tightly for a very long time.
I sit in the grey morning light of the ward and I let it undo.
