"Well, what are you waiting for?" Greta chuckled. "Put it on. Let’s see if it works like Selah said it would."
Grae ran his fingers over the grooves of the design. She had just been wearing this. It still carried her heat.
"I think... I should be alone," he said, glancing up at her.
He was going to go from rembering nothing to rembering everything, and now that he held that power of recalling the past in the palm of his hand, he was suddenly... anxious. His whole life had changed, but he couldn’t rember it.
At the ti when all of these events were happening, he had eased into them, acting autonomously, choosing each decision, engaging in the behavior that brought them here. Would it now feel like he was a passive observer having the events revealed to him like a movie reel behind his eyes? Would he feel sohow dislocated or divorced from the life he had taken part in up to the point of losing his mory?
"That is probably a good idea," Greta agreed.
"When have you arranged for everyone to gather?" he asked Sam, closing his fingers around the dallion that still held his mate’s body heat.
"After everyone has broken their fast, they will be arriving. No one is going to market today," Sam told him.
Grae looked at the position of the sun in the morning sky. It was a blessing to have this talisman now, assuming it would work, because if he had his mory back it would help in speaking to the pack mbers about what had occurred the previous night—about their Luna being gone and most of the alyko returning. It was going to be a difficult discussion to lead to begin with, but doing it without his mory would have been exceedingly more difficult.
"You have ti," Greta placed a reassuring hand on his arm.
"I will back," he said, turning to leave them without another word.
He walked briskly through the woods toward his childhood ho, clutching the necklace in his hand. It would have been ideal to go to the treehouse—that was where he felt most comfortable. That is the place he now associated with ho, if he could even be said to have one. But it would take too long. It was quite a bit further than his parents’ house, so it only made sense to stop here instead.
Grae paused his steps as the front door ca into view. He expected the sa door and entryway as usual, but instead he was greeted by the addition of a surprising number of pumpkins with faces carved out of them—a few even flickering with candles that were still burning from the night before.
Rather than the heavy weight of past mories weighing on him as they always did when he returned to this house, there was this whimsical tribute to the human holiday of Halloween. Greta said his mate taught art to the pups. This must have been their doing.
A crooked smile spread over his face. He walked up to get a closer look at the scary and comical expressions cut into these plump orange root vegetables. The pups must adore her. That’s all he could think of while examining the group of these together, expressing the separate individual personalities of the pups who had carved them.
"You are quite happy for being hollow," he picked up one of the lit lanterns and spoke to it before blowing out the weak fla within.
He blew out the rest of the candles that were still fighting to remain burning, considering how he felt hollow as well—how this house itself felt like a hollow vessel, all the life scooped out of it after his parents’ deaths. It was painful to return here. He always felt that way.
When he finally walked in the front door, a different energy t him that he was not expecting. It no longer felt like the dark, hollow house that danced painfully with the mory of a fla that had already been snuffed out. A new fla had been ignited. He saw its light everywhere. There was life here.
And his mate’s scent was everywhere. He followed it through the living room and kitchen and into his parents’ room where the bed was still disheveled from the last ti they had been it.
This was such a strange thing to discover—the traces of a life he had begun to live with his mate over the palimpsest of the one lived by his parents. He walked to the string of fairy lights that were a new addition to the wall—plucking the one photo that was clipped to it. This couldn’t be his mate—this was a photo of an older female. Perhaps it was her mother.
He sighed, clipping the photo back in place and tracing his way back toward the bed. The closets were open a bit, revealing the clothes that he and August had moved into them. With the dallion still in one hand, he opened her closet the rest of the way. These were his mate’s things.
Grae remained poised on the edge of this precipice looking at the evidence of what he couldn’t recall, anxious about the fall back into his life for so reason that he couldn’t explain. And then sothing caught his eye tucked away in the back of the closet. He frowned and squatted down, reaching to pull out what felt like an artist’s canvas.
"Maggie," he said in awe, recognizing the portrait that had been painted there in its beautiful impressionistic style with broad, jewel-colored strokes. She looked just as if she had been plucked from his mories.
He ran his fingers over the texture on the canvas, following the paths his mate’s brush had taken in creating this beautiful painting. August must have known how much this would an to him.
"She saw my mory of you," he breathed. That was the only way she could have recreated Maggie like this. There were no photos of her.
He blew out a breath and propped the portrait against the wall before sitting down on the bed with the talisman in hand. It was ti to do this. It was ti to rember all of the remarkable twists and turns his life had taken the last several weeks.
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