Page 63 of Knot the Plan
“Noted.”
“I'm bringing her a cutting board,” Logan says.
“You... “ She blinks at him. “You already have a cutting board?”
“Walnut. It's in my truck.”
“Why is there a cutting board in your truck?”
“There's usually a couple. I make them from the offcuts.” He shrugs, like this is a normal thing to have on hand, riding around town with gifts. “You never know when somebody's going to need a board.”
She laughs, tired and cracked at the edges and completely real, and for a second the porch is easy, the four of us are easy, and it would take so little. One sentence. Any of us. Four words and this stops being an arrangement with a countdown on it.
The second passes. Nobody spends it.
“Goodnight, Josie,” I say.
“Goodnight,” she says, and her eyes go over the three of us, one at a time, careful. Like she's counting us. Like she's making sure the count comes out the same tomorrow.
Three, sweetheart. The count's three.
I keep that behind my teeth, where it lives with everything else.
Then she's inside. The door shuts. The lock turns. The three of us stand there a beat too long, not looking at each other, before we head back down her porch steps like a crew leaving a call none of us wants to write up.
Hudson starts the engine and doesn't pull out right away.
Nobody takes her seat. It rides home empty, and the cab still tastes like brown sugar, and the low alpha part of me that's been leaning toward her all night has nowhere left to lean.
“Tomorrow, then,” Hudson says.
“Tomorrow,” I say.
He drives. I lean my head back and I finally let myself look at the thought that's been riding in the truck with us since the highway.
The plan says we let my mother down gently. The plan says a week, give or take, and I wrote it, and I'll tell you what I left out of it. In hindsight, maybe on purpose.
A definition of gently.
Because nobody lands a plane in a week. Not softly. My mother notices everything, she'd clock a one-week exit from a mile out, and then the whole point of the soft landing is shot. Gently isn't a week. Gently is Sundays. Plural. Any alpha with basic tactical sense could tell you that, and I'd know, because I plan to be the alpha telling everyone that.
Next Sunday there's a roast. The Sunday after that, there's a roast.
I'm not saying anything. I'm saying the exit's a long hallway, and I'm the one holding the map, and there's no rule about how slow an alpha's allowed to walk.
A window goes gold in the little blue house, and Hudson watches it in the mirror half a block longer than driving requires, and beside me Logan's got his hand resting on the back of her empty seat like he's steadying something, and none of us says a word.
Five o'clock tomorrow.
I tell Hudson to drive faster, and I don't examine why.
Chapter 23
Josie
Nobody warns you that a lie you built to last a month can turn around and start keepingyou.
I'm on Cynthia Morrow's front porch on a warm June Sunday, holding a bowl of potato salad I made from scratch because I could not walk into this woman's house with a store one.
