I caught Roderick on the back porch before he could disappear into his office for the rest of the night.
Maeve: Two minutes. That's all I want.
Roderick: You had your two minutes inside.
He kept walking and I kept following him anyway, which tells you everything about how smart I am.
Maeve: Leave me out of it. Say I'm sick. Say the human got lost on the way to the car.
Roderick: No.
Maeve: Why not? I'm not a wolf. I'm not one of you.
Roderick: You live in my house. That makes you mine to present.
Mine, like a coat he had to bring in out of the rain before it ruined the rug.
Roderick: The clerk pulled your name, and if I leave you home, the king's people will ask me why.
Roderick: I don't have an answer for that. So you come.
I hated how small my voice got, and I hated even more that he heard it and didn't care one bit.
Maeve: Please. I've never asked you for one thing. Not once in my whole life.
Roderick: You've asked me for plenty.
Maeve: Name one thing.
Roderick: A roof. Food. A bed that isn't a ditch.
He said it like a bill he'd been keeping folded in a drawer for twenty-two years.
My boot pressed into the boards and I felt the money folded into the lining, four hundred and twelve dollars of my whole escape an inch from his polished boots.
Maeve: So that's the deal forever? I owe you for being born?
Roderick: Don't start.
Roderick: Wear the gray dress. Stand where I put you. Keep your mouth shut for one night.
Roderick: Then you can go back to being invisible.
He went inside and shut the door gently, like I wasn't worth slamming it.
I stood there with my hands shaking, my eyes hot, and my chest full of words that had nowhere left to go.
I walked around the side of the house, past the bins, to the strip of trees behind the fence.
That was where I went when I needed the world to feel bigger than that house.
It was getting dark, the pines smelled cold, and the bugs were out in force around my head.
Maeve: One night. He says it like one night is nothing.
Then the birds stopped, not slowly, but all at once, like someone had flipped a switch in the trees.
Something moved between two trunks, big and low to the ground, way too big to be a stray dog.
It stepped into a patch of dying light, and I saw the eyes first, pale silver and steady and locked right on me.
Wolves didn't come this close to the pack house, because wolves knew better than that.
My stomach pulled tight with the same tug I'd felt under the streetlight, and my brain coughed up gray eyes and a tall man who vanished when I looked again.
Maeve: No. That's stupid. That's a wolf. That's just a wolf.
It didn't growl and it didn't move, it just watched me like it had all night and I had nowhere to be.
I backed up the drive and didn't run until I hit the porch light.
And I couldn't shake the feeling that something had already picked me out of the crowd.