That I wasn’t a werewolf gave me some leeway of behavior, but not much.

We were eating formally again, as we had been since Christy had moved in. Four werewolves, Adam, Jesse, Christy, and I meant eight people, which was, to give her credit, too many people for the kitchen table. Eating in the dining room with Christy cooking meant bouquets cut and arranged from the garden, good china, and cloth napkins folded into cute hatlike things or flowers.

The tablecloth tonight had been hurriedly purchased (Jesse had been sent out to the store earlier) because Christy’s favorite tablecloth, unearthed from the linen closet, had a stain on it—discovered just as I came in from work. She hadn’t looked at me, but the sad note in her voice had Auriele glaring at me and a few reproachful looks from everyone else, including Jesse. The other tablecloths were dirty, and there was no way we could eat at a table without a tablecloth.

I had not said a number of things—one of which was, if it was such a favorite of hers, then why hadn’t she taken it with her? Another unsaid comment was that if I’d known her grandmother had given it to her on her wedding day, I would have ripped it into shreds and used a paper tablecloth before I’d put it on the table for last Thanksgiving. Instead of saying anything, I’d ignored the whole dramatic show and gone upstairs to change my clothes from work, leaving Adam to listen to Christy try to decide if there was any way to salvage her grandmother’s tablecloth.

It had taken a pep talk with the mirror to get myself out of the bedroom and downstairs to eat with everyone else. Dinner had been served, the pack gossiped over, then Darryl asked me about the kill site the police had taken me to. I’d briefed Adam over the phone, but there hadn’t been time to really hash the matter out.

“I mean, Mercy,” Christy said, as if she hadn’t noticed the rise in tension when she interrupted me, “why don’t we hold off talk of dead bodies until after people are done with the food? I spent too long making this for it to go to waste.”

For tonight’s dinner, Christy had made lasagna (from scratch, including the noodles), and I’d been shuffling it around on my plate because knowing that she’d made the food made me not want to eat it. That it was pretty and smelled good wasn’t as much of an incentive to consuming it as I’d have thought it would be.

“It’s okay, Mom,” said Jesse with forced cheer, trying to defuse the situation. “Dinner is kind of when everything gets ironed out. Sometimes it’s hard to get everyone in the same room afterward.”