Chapter 369: No Longer Hollow
"Well, what are you waiting for?" Greta chuckled. "Put it on. Let’s see if it works like Selah said it would."
Graeme 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 remembering nothing to remembering 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 remember it.
At the time 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 somehow dislocated or divorced from the life he had taken part in up to the point of losing his memory?
"That is probably a good idea," Greta agreed.
"When have you arranged for everyone to gather?" he asked Sam, closing his fingers around the medallion 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.
Graeme 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 memory back it would help in speaking to the pack members 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 memory would have been exceedingly more difficult.
"You have time," 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 home, 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 home, 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.
Graeme paused his steps as the front door came into view. He expected the same 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 memories 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 flame 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 met him that he was not expecting. It no longer felt like the dark, hollow house that danced painfully with the memory of a flame that had already been snuffed out. A new flame 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 time 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 medallion still in one hand, he opened her closet the rest of the way. These were his mate’s things.
Graeme 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 some reason that he couldn’t explain. And then something 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 memories.
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 mean to him.
"She saw my memory 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 time to do this. It was time to remember all of the remarkable twists and turns his life had taken the last several weeks.
