The correct choice was clear. I’d always been excellent at identifying correct choices.
Making them was more difficult.
Sloane: Traveling around this area for a little while.
Vague.
Technically true, if traveling around the area included trips between my apartment, the grocery store, and the post office.
Mason: What area?
I froze.
Patty: Don’t interrogate her.
Mason: I’m asking one question.
Byron: All interrogations begin with questions.
Trevor: some begin with ominous lighting
Karen: Sloane, are you still avoiding social media?
I looked around my apartment. The television was on, displaying an unmoving screensaver with no sound. I still had ten cupcakes left on the covered tray. My laptop sat open to twenty-seven unanswered emails.
Avoiding social media was one of the few claims I could support without further invention.
Sloane: Mostly.
Grandma Ruth: THAT’S WHY SHE NEVER KNOWS WHAT’S HAPPENING.
Trevor: neither does grandpa and he’s literally in every chat
Grandpa Alfonse: His response set off a round of laughing reactions.
I smiled before I could stop myself.
Then Grandma Ruth posted a photograph. It showed a younger woman wearing a black hat. Her face was mostly obscured by sunglasses and an enormous scarf.
Grandma Ruth: WASN’T YOUR HAIR RED?
I touched my sandy-blonde hair reflexively, which was obvious in the grainy profile picture I’d uploaded when I first set up my account for clients.
Sloane: It used to be.
Julie: I remember it being very pretty.
Karen: It was an unnatural shade.
Patty: We get it, Aunt Karen. You fear joy.
A small snort escaped me. Apparently, proof of identity within this family required less rigor than opening a bank account and more improv than community theater.
For the next hour, people remembered things about me that had never happened – at least not to me. Mason recalled that I hated tomatoes. Someone named Ellen said I once slept in her hammock during a thunderstorm. Grandma Ruth remembered me bringing apple pie to a family dinner. A Carpenter cousin insisted I had a tattoo of a pinecone on my ankle.
I answered carefully.
Yes, I still hated tomatoes (True… what were they anyway, a fruit or vegetable? Freaky).
The hammock sounded plausible (Who didn’t like the sound of a good storm when they were sleeping?).
The pie recipe had been lost (just in case someone requested it.).
The tattoo was private (again, in case someone requested a picture of it.).
To my relief, nobody questioned any of it.
The ease of the deception made me feel worse, but it also made me feel included, which was apparently enough to overpower several ethical concerns swirling around in the back of my mind.
I spent the rest of Sunday waiting for someone to realize the mistake. Surely the real Loany would check her phone, discover she’d been left out of the family chat, and reach out to someone to correct it. Perhaps she would arrive with documentation, photographs, and a pinecone tattoo I could not replicate.
But nobody did.
On Monday morning, Trevor posted a photograph of a dented mailbox.
Trevor: hypothetical question: how fast can a wolf hit a mailbox
Several people responded immediately.
Mason: YOU HIT IT?
Trevor: not with a car
Mason: That clarification made it worse.
Karen: Why were you in wolf form near the road?
Trevor: hypothetically
I paused over that.
Wolf form. I waited for someone to clarify.
Hilary: Come see me.
Trevor: this feels punitive
Hudson: Bring the mailbox.
Trevor: it’s attached to the ground
Hudson: Then bring tools.
I read the exchange twice.
The wolf comments were constant but never quite clear enough to mean anything. People talked about shifting schedules, running trails, moon nights, scent blockers, and council regulations. I assumed it was some family role-playing tradition or an inside joke no outsider would understand.
The younger crowd seemed especially obsessed with wolves. Their profile pictures included cartoon wolves, wolf silhouettes, paw prints, and, in Trevor’s case, an AI-generated image of a wolf wearing sunglasses and holding a glue gun.
All families had quirks. Mine went on European vacations and introduced me to separated men in airplane aisles. Theirs loved wolves. I didn’t bother too hard with trying to figure it out.
Over the next several days,
THE PACK became part of my routine so gradually that I didn’t notice it happening. I checked it after brushing my teeth. While eating cereal. During file exports. Between client calls. At night, I took my phone to bed and read until the conversations slowed.
The family existed inside my mind as names, typing styles, and profile icons. Only a few used actual photographs. Julie’s picture showed a glamorous blonde woman in pink sunglasses. Hilary was a dark-haired woman standing beside a lake with one arm around Julie’s waist. Patty’s was an artsy selfie in black and white, showing her looking out into the distance.
Hudson’s profile picture was not a picture of him at all. It showed a mountain ridge beneath an overcast sky.
I had still developed an image of him in my mind.
He was probably serious-looking. Maybe older than the others (except Grandma Ruth and Grandpa Alfonse). I envisioned him as a bookish type of guy, maybe with glasses? Perhaps a dad bod?
He used complete sentences and punctuation, even when everyone else abandoned both. He rarely joined the chaos without purpose. When somebody needed directions, he sent them. When Grandma Ruth’s grocery delivery went to the wrong house, he found it. When a cousin’s car wouldn’t start, Hudson said he’d be there with jumper cables before anyone finished offering suggestions. Everyone went to him and no one ever asked whether he was busy.
By Wednesday, I knew that Julie cooked for too many people on purpose, Hilary could silence three arguments with one sentence, and Byron approached ordinary life as an academic debate. Mason argued for recreation. Trevor required supervision.
Patty seemed lighthearted and didn’t take anything too seriously, to the dismay of Aunt Karen, who constantly corrected her. Aunt Karen had never encountered a subject she couldn’t make unpleasant.
Patty and I began talking privately because of a graphic novel. She had posted a meme featuring a panel from
Nocturnal Hearts, a fantasy series about a witch who inherited a failing funeral home and discovered the corpses were unionized.
I had reacted before thinking.
Sloane: The embalmer subplot deserved better.
The chat paused.
Then Patty sent me a direct message.
Patty: YOU KNOW NOCTURNAL HEARTS?????
I stared at the capital letters, not knowing if I should respond. Was it a good idea to engage in a private conversation with one of the family members? Probably not, but damn, the idea of having someone to discuss my favorite book series with was too enticing to pass up.
Sloane: I own all nine volumes.
Her response arrived immediately.
Patty: I have been alone in this family for YEARS.
Patty: Aunt Karen thinks graphic novels are “picture books for adults who fear paragraphs.”
Sloane: Your aunt has clearly chosen violence as a lifestyle.
Patty: I knew I liked you.
We spent the next hour discussing the series, the catastrophic screen adaptation and its terrible casting, and whether the main character should have ended up with the groundskeeper of the cemetery instead of the cursed prince.
Patty sent long messages full of capital letters and over-the-top punctuation. She had incredibly specific opinions, but it made it easy to talk to her because she never paused long enough for me to become self-conscious. Every time I considered whether my response sounded too eager, she had already sent three more messages.
Our private chat didn’t stop with the books.
I quickly learned that Patty was twenty-four and a freelance artist. She sent photographs of a jacket she was painting and asked which colors worked best. I helped her adjust the composition of a print she wanted to sell.
The following day, Byron posted a homework problem in the main chat.
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