Chapter 47 The journal
Ivy POV
I didn't read it Wednesday. Or Thursday.
I kept it in my bag both days. I felt it every time I picked the bag up. I knew it was there without looking at it.Thursday morning it sat on my kitchen table while I made coffee.
It stayed in my bag during my seminar. It sat on my desk while I tried to work through my behavioral psychology reading. I got through four paragraphs. Then I closed the textbook, looked at the bag and looked away again.
Lucas noticed. He didn't say anything.
That was the right call.Caden was two doors down. He didn't push either. Both of them just waiting.
Friday morning I woke at six. I stayed in bed for a while. The day felt different. Like it had already decided something. I got up. Made coffee. Sat at the table.
I put my bag on the chair beside me. Took out the journal. Set it on the table in front of me and looked at it. Dark cover. Worn corners. Slight bend in the rim from years of being carried.
I put my hand flat on the cover. Then I opened it. Her handwriting was smaller than I remembered. I had seen it before on grocery lists I kept after she died. Her everyday writing. Clear. Meant to be read.
This was different. Smaller. More careful. A writing meant for no one else. I read slowly. She had started it before she arrived in New York. The early pages were signed with a name I didn't know. A different name. Not Elena Sinclair. Someone else.
I sat with it for a moment. She had been someone else before she was my mother. Before she was Elena. A different person in a different place with a different life. She wrote about where she came from. Not by name. She was careful about names throughout. But the picture was there. A large territory with strict order to things. Rules she had grown up inside and understood completely.
And had started to question it. Slowly. Quietly. She wrote about Miriam. A lot.
With warmth.
“She found me when I had nothing. She was the first person who spoke to me like I mattered. Like I wasn't just useful, like I was a person”.
I stopped at that last line. “useful”. I read it again then kept reading. She wrote about something she could do. She was careful here. She went around it. Never named it directly. But it was there.
She could sense things in other wolves. Feel the state they were in. And with effort, at a cost to herself. She could shift it.
“I was born able to do this, she wrote. I didn't choose it. I can't give it back. It is what I am. Miriam called it the old gift. She said it hadn't appeared in our line for a very long time”.
“Our line”.
I stopped. Read it again. Miriam and my mother. The same line. I held that and kept reading. She wrote about why she left.
This part was the most careful. Sentences that started, then stopped. Paragraphs that got close to something and turned away at the last moment.
But enough came through. Someone wanted to use what she could do. At a scale she couldn't agree to.
“I would have been the instrument”, she wrote. Whether I agreed or not. I understood that the night I found the documents. I understood what had been planned. What I had been brought into without being told”.
She never wrote who it was. Not once. Just phrases. The one I ran from. The one who must never find her. No name. Always that gap where a name should be. She wrote about Miriam helping her leave. The fear of starting over. Becoming someone new.
Building a life in a world she had only ever lived at the edges of. Miriam said: “You will be afraid for a long time. Then you will stop being afraid and start being alive. She was right about the first part. I am still waiting for the second”.
I stopped.
Read that line three times.
I am still waiting.
She never got there.Twelve years in this city and she never fully stopped being afraid. I pressed my hand flat on the page. Sat with it. Then I thought about myself.
The past six weeks. Caden. Lucas. Maya. Everyone and everything that had been happening.
Was I still waiting?
I turned the page.
The last pages were different. Bigger handwriting. Less careful. Like she was running out of time. She wrote about me. About something that happened when I was five. She didn't say it straight. She went around it. Got close. Then pulled back.
But enough came through. Something had happened. Something she had seen in me that scared her. Not because it was wrong. Because of what it meant if anyone found out.
I used everything I had, she wrote. Everything. And I locked it away. She will grow up not knowing. She will be safer that way. But she is not—
The sentence stopped. Mid thought. The rest of the page was empty. I turned it. Also blank. The journal ended there.
She is not—
I stared at the blank page for a long time.
Then I closed the journal. Sat very still at my kitchen table. The October light outside. The city moving like it always did. The bond warm two doors down. I picked up my phone. Called Caden. First ring.
"I read it," I said.
"Are you okay?" he said.
I sat there with it. My mother's words. I am still waiting and the idea that she never reached the part where it changed.
Then the other line
She is not—
And nothing after it. Just a blank page after it. I looked at the table.
"I don't know what I am," I said quietly.
A pause.
"I know," he said. "But we're going to find out." Another pause. "Together."
"Come over," I said.
"I'm already in the hall," he said.
I got up. Opened the door.