When the Wolf Comes Home

by Nat Cassidy

Conspiracy theories are basically just fairy tales for adults, aren’t they?

For a moment there, she’d thought grief was done with her, at least for today. No such luck; the tears were just waiting, right behind her eyes, to begin their assault anew. Nobody hides like tears, she realizes. We could learn a thing or two from them.

Santos also lost a parent—his father, to a swift and brutal lymphoma twenty-two years ago. Nearly half his life now, but he’ll never forget those days in the immediate aftermath. That grief so keen it made it hard to breathe, as if he himself were the one who’d actually died and was only slowly coming to realize it. That sense of unreality, that shrieking alarm in your head, telling you there’d been a mistake, this wasn’t right, you’re in the wrong reality.