I thought I was losing my mind.
That was my first thought — not fear, not grief, just the cold, clinical certainty that something had gone wrong inside my head.
It was a Tuesday afternoon, the kind of grey October day that smelled like wet leaves and car exhaust. I pulled into the pickup line at Maplewood Academy the same way I did every weekday, fifteen minutes early, coffee going cold in the cupholder. Picking up Noah and Liam was the one part of my day I never delegated. Not to the housekeeper, not to any of the pack staff who would have gladly done it. These two boys had come into my life as newborns, red-faced and screaming and entirely without a mother. The least I could do was be the person they saw first when school let out.
I was checking my phone when the front doors swung open.
And then I looked up.
She was standing at the top of the stone steps, backlit by the pale afternoon light, one arm wrapped around Noah's small shoulders and the other around Liam's. Both boys had their faces pressed into her sides like they already knew her, like this was something that happened every day.
My coffee cup hit the floor of the car.
Vivian.
Vivian Ashford. My stepsister. Buried three years ago in a white casket while the rain came down in sheets and half the pack stood around saying what a shame it was — a woman that beautiful, reduced to ash. I had stood at the back of the crowd and felt nothing except a dull, complicated guilt about feeling nothing.
She looked exactly the same.
That was the worst part. Not that she was there — my brain hadn't caught up to that yet — but that she was *unchanged*. Same dark hair falling in loose waves past her shoulders. Same delicate features that had always made her look like she needed protecting. She was wearing a pale blue coat I didn't recognize, and she was smiling down at Liam, and my hands were gripping the steering wheel hard enough to whiten my knuckles.
*You're dead.*
I didn't say it out loud. I couldn't speak at all. I just sat there while the other parents' cars inched forward around mine, someone tapping their horn gently behind me.
My mind reached for logic, the way it always did when things got bad. I ran through the facts like a list.
Vivian Ashford. My stepfather's daughter by another woman — a woman who had been sleeping with my father long before the divorce, long before everything fell apart. Vivian and I had never been close. How could we be? Her existence was built on the wreckage of my mother's marriage. But she had been *real*. She had lived in the same house as me for two years. She had borrowed my shampoo and left her shoes in the hallway and died at twenty-six of causes the pack doctors called cardiac failure.
And then Alpha Damien Blackwood — her mate, the father of her children — had come to me four months later with his jaw set and his eyes hollow, holding a phone with her final text message still on the screen. He'd asked me to be a mother to Noah and Liam. He'd asked me to be his wife.
I had said yes without hesitating.
I told myself it was because I knew what it felt like to grow up without someone in your corner. That was true. But there was more to it than that, things I hadn't let myself examine too closely. Damien and I had built something quiet and steady in the months since. Not passionate, not electric, but *real* in its own way. We took care of each other. We took care of the boys. I had started to think that was enough.
The car behind me honked again, longer this time.
I forced my door open.
My legs carried me up the steps on autopilot. Vivian looked up when she heard my footsteps, and for one suspended second, her expression was completely unreadable.
Then she smiled — that same careful, practiced smile she'd always worn around me — and said, simply, "Isabella."
Like three years hadn't passed. Like she hadn't been dead.
Like this was nothing.
Noah tugged on her sleeve and pointed at me. "That's Mama Bella," he announced proudly.
Something moved across Vivian's face then. Fast, almost invisible. But I caught it.
And suddenly I wasn't sure which one of us she was more afraid of.
