I can't believe I did it.
Brushing my fingertips over the indentations of my words on the paper, I try to remember how I felt when I wrote them. Vague ideas like "exhilarated" and "terrified" come to me, but I can't experience that day again, no matter how hard I imagine.
It was the day my life completely changed. The day I invoked the right to leave our pack and live a mortal life for five years, instead of simply accepting the transformation and becoming a full werewolf.
The intercom chimed its gentle breakfast announcement and I put my old diary back in the bedside drawer, where it's awaited my return for the past five years. But I'm not the seventeen-year-old I was when I left. I'm a grown-up stranger in that girl's bedroom, with its soft pink canopy bed curtains and gleaming white furniture.
You just got home, I remind myself. Give it time.
I go to the vanity where I spent so many teenage hours practicing my eyeliner skills and contouring my face to Kardashian perfection. Things were much simpler then, before I heard of the Right of Accord. I hurry through my makeup routine—I may have arrived in the middle of the night, but Vivianne Dixon expects her children to look "acceptable" to her standards no matter the circumstances—and dig through one of my wardrobe trunks for a silk floral peasant top and dark wash jeans.
My childhood home is an outdated "modern" mansion my parents had custom built in the late eighties, long before I was born. Our kind—their kind, until I make my final decision—live long enough to make a lot of bad style choices. Mother and father have already tucked into their breakfast in the stark white, oblong dining room. The black Lucite dining table is set with square white platters of more food than we'll eat, and mother looks up from taking a helping of mixed fruits from one of them. The cold blue light of the early morning filters down from the octagonal skylight and creates a halo of silver around her gray hair.
"Darling, I didn't expect to see you this morning. Hudson said you didn't arrive until nearly four." She doesn't rise from her seat, but waits for me to lean down so she can kiss the air beside my cheek. "That's an…interesting top."
"Thanks." I pretend she means it, and round the table to put an arm around my father's shoulder in a half-hug. By the time he swallows his toast and dabs his mouth with his napkin, I'm already back to my seat. I shake out my own linen napkin and smooth it over my lap. "I did get in late."
"Well, it's a long flight from London," father says, and it's probably all he'll have to say for the whole breakfast.
Mother will make up for it. "Other than the delay, how was your flight?"
"It was fine." I take a croissant and some fruit, my stomach still roiling from the salmon I ate on the plane. It had not agreed with me. "I slept most of the way."
"Good. Then you won't be too jet lagged for tonight."
"Mother—" I begin, but she doesn't look at me, concentrating on buttering half of an English muffin. If she doesn't look at me, she can pretend I haven't objected.
"Of course, if your flight had arrived on time, we would have been able to get you something suitable to wear." She glances up and briefly purses her lips. "No matter. I had Tara send over a few gowns. From before she gained all that weight."
I may have been gone for five years, but I've seen plenty of photos of my sister on Facebook. She's gone up a single dress-size, maybe.
Totally unacceptable for a daughter of Vivianne Dixon.
"Look, I just got in and the ball is a lot—"
"A lot of work?" Mother interrupts me. "Yes. It is. It's what makes it an obligation. And it's also the perfect opportunity to make a fresh debut to the pack. To show them that your little…walkabout, as it were, is finally over."
"I haven't—" I stop myself. I've been in my parents' presence for minutes and my mother has already started making me feel bonkers. I'm not about to start my first morning back with an argument.
"You haven't had time to unpack or do anything with your hair," she says, waving her hand.
I self-consciously touch my freshly straightened blonde locks.
"I've booked Jonathan for two hours with you today," she prattles on. "Not enough time to fix those highlights, but I'm sure he can make something out of all…"
My fists clench under the table as she gestures vaguely at my problem areas. Which, to her, is all of me.
"Listen…" I begin tentatively. It will do me no good to sound argumentative. "I know what a huge deal the ball is and how long everyone has prepared for it. I don't want to drag you all down and make you look bad.""Nonsense, puppy," father says placidly, his eyes scanning his iPad the way he used to ignore us for the newspaper. "You could never make us look bad."
Mother chokes on her coffee and tries to pass it off as a gently teasing laugh. "Well. There was that one teensy little time."
The time I invoked my right to think for myself, to not accept the transformation as my fate. The time I dared put myself before the Dixon name.
"But that's all in the past. You're home now." Mother's smile is a warning. "And Ashton has been asking about you."
My stomach curdles in a way that has nothing to do with the first-class salmon. "Oh?"
"He's never given up on you," she goes on with a sigh. "Very romantic, if you ask me."
Or pathetic, if she asked me, but she didn't. I keep it to myself. There's nothing romantic about the idea of returning to my old life, my old fate, delayed by five years. I assumed that by rejecting the transformation, I effectively rejected Ashton Daniels.
"I thought he would have found a mate by now." Hoped. I hoped he had found a mate by now. But if he didn't…
"No. He's never renounced his claim on you, even after your little tantrum."
"It wasn't a tantrum, it was—" I stop myself, force another smile, and subdue my sigh of frustration. "I just hoped he would have moved on and found happiness, rather than waiting around for me."
"I suppose that's guilt you'll simply have to live with." Mother's words pointedly imply that my former fiancé isn't the only person I should feel badly about inconveniencing. "It's possible he's forgiven you."
"And it's possible he hasn't, and he'll mention that tonight, in front of everyone," Father adds helpfully.
Mother nods. "A bridge you'll need to cross when we come to it, Bailey. You publicly humiliated the poor man."
He was a poor boy, then, and at the time, I did feel terrible about invoking the right. But he had a choice. He could have invoked the right himself and come with me, if he really wanted to be together.
Thankfully, he didn't.
"And if he decides to humiliate me in return with a public rejection tonight, I can accept that." Besides, ending our engagement is the least he can do for both of us.
"He wouldn't dare," Mother reassures me. "The Fealty Rite is too important to risk making a scene."
Another warning. I'm not to fuck anything up for her, tonight. I already destroyed her carefully cultivated image in front of the pack.
Hudson, the thrall Mother and Father hired as our butler right before I left for London, enters, pushing a cart bearing two trays covered by silver domes.
It's a myth that werewolves can't touch silver.
Mother sits back as he places the plate in front of her and lifts the lid. A human heart, glistening with congealed blood, rest on a bed of lettuce. Mother gasps in delight and softly claps her hands in appreciation. "Bravo, Hudson. I don't know where you keep finding these perfect little morsels."
"A trade secret, ma'am." He retrieves the other platter and sets it in front of father, lifting the dome to reveal a nearly identical meal. Father mutters a thank you, and both my parents take up their silverware and tuck in, traditional breakfasts forgotten.
It's a sight I've seen hundreds of times, before every religious ceremony and full moon over the course of my entire life. But after five years living among the humans, I view the organs a bit more personally.
As in, they were once people.
Either I hide my disgust well or my mother ignores it. She cuts a slice from the heart in front of her and nods toward my plate. "Well. Eat up. We have a busy day."
I choke my down croissant. My dread at the thought of the ball, of seeing Ashton again? Much harder to swallow.