But I knocked lightly at the door.

“Who is it?” Jesse asked.

“Me,” I said, and opened the door when she invited me in.

Jesse was stretched out on her bed with schoolbooks scattered around and her headphones dangling around her neck. One of the earpieces was caught in the patch of purple hair just in front of her left ear. She didn’t look up when I came in.

“I’m just heading to bed,” I told her. “You might consider going to sleep sometime before you have to get up, too.”

“Why did you let her do that to you?” Jesse asked tightly, without looking at me. She wrote a few numbers down in the notebook in front of her.

I shut the door and came farther into the room. I had to pick my path. My nose would have told me if there were any rotting food, but there was sure as heck everything else scattered all over the floor. My room used to look sort of like this before I moved in with Adam. Now I itched to pick up the dirty clothes and throw them in her clothes hamper. After I dumped out the eclectic collection of stuff already in it.

“Do what to me?” I asked absently. She had a cricket bat sticking out the top of the hamper. Why a cricket bat? She didn’t play cricket. Not as far as I knew, anyway.

“Dinner was my fault,” Jesse said, effectively jerking my attention back to her, where it belonged. “She wanted to make BLTs, and I didn’t see any harm in it until you came home, and she was inviting people over, deciding we’d eat in the dining room, and giving orders left and right.”

“Dinner was good,” I said. “I’ve never had homemade mayonnaise before. And your mother is welcome to invite whomever she wishes to dinner—especially if she is cooking it.”

Jesse sat up and tossed her pencil on the bed. She wiped her eyes.

“You know,” she said hotly. “You understand people, Mercy. You know how power works—I’ve seen you with the pack. Why did you let her take control without even fighting back?”

I sat down on the bed beside her without touching her and let air out in a huff. With the air I gave up my night of rolling in my spite. For Jesse, I could be a better person right now.

“Your mom is scared,” I said honestly. “She invited this handsome prince into her life and now a man is dead because of it. She had to ask for help from your father after she’d told the world she didn’t need him. She had to come here, to the home she built, and know that it isn’t hers anymore, that I’ve taken her place.”

“She chose that,” Jesse all but hissed.