For the Wolf (Wilderwood #1)

by Hannah F. Whitten

That was what a mother should be, wasn’t it? Stable ground, even once you were grown?

The talk of grief stirred it up in Red’s chest, dust that never quite settled. Her grief for Isla was strange and distant. Death didn’t gild her, it just fixed her in Red’s memory, a line with a finite beginning and ending and no chance to be more than it had been. “I don’t think I can mourn her,” Red murmured. Eammon glanced at her, brow furrowed. “I mourn the idea of her, maybe. The gap between what a mother is supposed to be and what she was.” She blinked hard against the burn in her eyes, shook her head. “That probably doesn’t make sense.” “It does. Sometimes you don’t mourn people so much as you mourn who they could’ve been.”