The Forgotten Wife Heir to the Fortune

The last shirt goes into the suitcase and I press my palms flat against the lid, staring at the zipper like it owes me something.

Tomorrow. The word sits in my chest like a stone.

Tomorrow I go back to Blackwood Academy.

I drag the zipper around the edges with more force than necessary, then shove the suitcase off the bed and let it thud onto the hardwood floor. My room is small enough that the sound bounces back immediately , off the secondhand dresser, off the water-stained ceiling, off the single window that looks out onto the neighbors' chain-link fence. I've spent all summer in this room and I still feel safer here than I do anywhere on that campus.

That's the truth I've been circling all afternoon while I packed: I don't want to go back.

Blackwood Academy is everything this bedroom is not. Marble floors. Cathedral ceilings. Manicured grounds that stretch so far you lose sight of the gates. It sits on the highest ridge of Silvermoon Pack territory like a crown, which is exactly the point , it was built to remind everyone who belongs there and who is merely tolerated. The children of Alphas, Betas, Gammas, pack warriors with old blood and deep pockets. The heirs. The legacy students. The ones who've known since birth exactly where they stand in the hierarchy.

And then there are the ten of us.

Ten scholarship students per year. Ten "charity cases" , that's not my word, that's the one that gets whispered in hallways and scratched into bathroom stalls. Charity case. Pack handout. The academy's embarrassment. I've heard every variation. I've been hearing them for three years, and I still haven't figured out how to make them stop landing.

I sink onto the edge of my mattress and press my fingertips to my temples.

The thing is, it's not just the money. Plenty of scholarship students keep their heads down and float through unnoticed. The problem is I don't blend. I physically cannot blend.

I get up before I can stop myself and cross to the mirror on the back of my door.

The girl looking back at me is not the problem , I know that, somewhere in the rational corner of my brain. But knowing something and feeling it are different animals. My hips are full. My waist dips in and curves back out in a way that no amount of oversized hoodies has ever successfully disguised. The rich girls at Blackwood are all sharp angles and designer athleisure, moving through the halls like they were assembled by an architect. I look like I was drawn freehand.

And then there's the hair.

Silver. Not bleached, not dyed , silver, naturally, the color of moonlight on still water, falling all the way to my hips in a sheet that I can never quite decide what to do with. At home it's fine. Here, it makes me invisible. At Blackwood it makes me a spectacle. Pair it with eyes the blue-white shade of a winter sky and I become the kind of thing people stare at , not always kindly.

'You look like a freak,' a girl named Vivienne told me freshman year, loud enough for her whole table to hear. 'Like, what even are you?'

I'd smiled and walked away and cried in the bathroom stall for eleven minutes. I timed it.

I turn away from the mirror.

The thing about Blackwood is that the social cruelty is just the surface layer. Underneath it is something older and more structural , the pack hierarchy, the constant performance of dominance and submission, the way every room full of young wolves crackles with testosterone and unspent aggression. Hormone-drunk boys with something to prove and the physical capability to prove it. I've watched two fights break out over seating arrangements. The energy on that campus is a live wire and I am made of the wrong material to touch it.

I cross back to the bed and sit, pulling my knees to my chest.

You're overthinking it, I tell myself. Same as every year. You'll get there, you'll find your people, and it'll be fine.

But then the other thought creeps in , the one that's been lurking all summer, the one that has nothing to do with Blackwood or scholarship stipends or Vivienne and her table of perfectly highlighted friends.

Who are you, really?

I press my cheek against my knees.

Mom and Dad , my real parents, the ones who chose me, who drive four hours to bring me home every school break and ask about my grades and leave notes in my lunch bags even now that I'm eighteen , they've never made me feel like anything other than theirs. I know that. I feel it in the way Mom hugs me like she's afraid I'll evaporate, in the way Dad slips twenty dollars into my coat pocket every time I leave because he thinks I don't notice. The love is real. The family is real.

But I think about them sometimes. The ones who didn't keep me.

I don't know their names. I don't know what they look like or where they live or if they ever think about the daughter they left behind. I don't even know why , illness, poverty, circumstance, choice. I've constructed a hundred different explanations over the years and none of them fit well enough to stop the ache.

Did you love me? That's the question I keep coming back to. Even for a second, did you look at me and love me?

I don't know how to stop needing an answer I'll probably never get.

The afternoon light shifts against the wall, going gold and then amber. I watch it for a long moment, letting the quiet settle around me. This bedroom. This small, imperfect, secondhand bedroom where my parents' voices come through the walls and Shadow the cat sits outside my door every morning demanding breakfast.

I have everything I need.

I just wish I knew why it still doesn't feel like enough.