A cold weight pressed into my chest and wouldn’t let go. I couldn’t wait any longer. I called Lewis.

The phone rang twice before his voice came through — rough, stripped bare of everything he usually kept carefully in place. "Riley."

I tried to speak, but the words broke apart before they reached my mouth, dissolving before I could shape them into anything useful. "Dad, he..."

His silence said everything before he did. The kind of silence that had already been sitting with the answer long enough to have begun making its peace with it.

"He’s gone."

The phone slipped from my hand and hit the floor.

I had known this was coming. Jeffrey had prepared for it carefully and without drama, the way he did everything — leaving nothing unfinished, no one unprovided for, every account settled, every person he loved given what they would need to continue without him. Every sign had been pointing here for months. The end had never really been in question, not if you were willing to look at it honestly.

But knowing something is coming and surviving its arrival are entirely different experiences. One lives in the mind. The other lands in the body, in the chest, in the place where grief takes up residence without asking.

It landed like a blade — clean, final, without mercy.

My knees hit the floor. I pressed both hands over my face and let the sobs come, tears spilling through my fingers, my whole body shaking with the weight of it. He had been a good man. Steady and quiet and sure, the kind of presence you stop consciously noticing until it’s gone and the absence of it reshapes every room he used to occupy. For twenty years he had stood at the center of this pack like a fixed point, and somewhere along the way I had loved him the way you love a grandfather — completely, without thinking about it, the way you love things that have simply always been there.

Even if he’d stayed — frail, bedridden, diminished to a fraction of what he had been — it wouldn’t have changed what mattered. He still would have been here. There still would have been someone to sit beside, someone whose presence filled a chair. Now there was only absence, and underneath it, the quiet, unsettling feeling that something which had been holding the Hales together had begun to come gently apart.

"Jeffrey... why did it have to be this way?"

The pack had resources, connections, the best medical care that money and influence could find. His body had failed him, but they could have bought more time — a few more months, another season, enough for something. But Lewis had been right about this, and I had known it even when I didn’t want to. No one can hold back someone who has already made their decision to go. Not an Alpha. Not medicine. Not love, no matter how much of it surrounds them.

A year ago, I had buried my grandmother. Now Jeffrey too.

Two people who had loved me without conditions or reservations, who had made me feel — in the particular way that only certain people can — that I had a rightful place in this world and deserved to take up space in it. Both of them gone now, within the same year, leaving gaps that nothing else would fill in quite the same shape.

"Jeffrey... Jeffrey..."

The housekeeper knelt beside me, her voice low and careful in the way of someone who had learned when not to say too much. "Ma’am, he left instructions. He asked you specifically to take care of yourself. Please — don’t let the grief break you. He wouldn’t want that."

Minutes ago this house had been full of laughter — the ordinary, unremarkable kind that you don’t think to memorize because you assume it will simply continue. Now the silence had a texture to it, something heavy and close that pressed against the walls and settled into corners. I lifted my eyes and found Everett standing perfectly still across the room, his small face turned toward something I couldn’t see, his eyes moving and searching with an alertness that was too focused to be nothing.

Then, slowly, he looked at me.

Something shifted in the air — a warmth, light and brief, like a hand laid gently on top of my head. The kind of touch that doesn’t announce itself.

I lifted my face. There was nothing there, of course. Nothing visible, nothing that could be pointed to or explained. But I knew it the same way I had always known certain things — not through reasoning, but through something older and quieter than that.

He had come back, just for a moment. He couldn’t leave his grandson without one last look, one last confirmation of the face he had loved. Couldn’t leave me without making sure, in his thorough and careful way, that I was going to be alright. That was so entirely like him — even now, even in this, thinking of everyone else first.

I could almost hear him. That same steady warmth he had always carried in his voice, unhurried and certain. Riley, don’t cry. I’m only going where she is.

A sob rose in my throat and I let it come, not fighting it. I whispered through shaking lips, "I’ll take care of them. Everett and Everly both. I swear it on everything I have. So please — go now. Rest. You’ve earned it."

A small current of air moved through the room, lifting a few strands of hair gently from my face before fading into nothing, leaving no trace of itself. The curtains shifted once — a single, soft movement — and then went still.

The house stayed exactly as it was. The light through the windows didn’t change. The sounds of the street outside continued, indifferent and unchanged, the world moving forward the way it always does, regardless of what has just gone out of it.

I stayed on the floor a little longer, my hands folded in my lap, breathing through the grief slowly and deliberately, the way Jeffrey himself had taught me without ever meaning to — by example, by steadiness, by simply enduring with grace whatever came.

By being, until the very end, exactly who he was.