Jorund had been standing in that aisle for four minutes and had not looked at a single shelf.
He had felt it at the town line that morning — a scent cutting through pine and diesel and the ordinary wet of Fernwick — and the wolf had come up so hard behind his ribs that Ulrik had put a hand on his shoulder in the truck and said nothing at all, which was the loudest thing his brother had done in years.
Now he was in a grocery store at nine in the evening, holding a basket he had no intention of filling.
"Is it her?"
Ulrik had asked from the cab.
"Yes,"
Jorund had said, and Ulrik had grinned with too many teeth and stayed by the door to make sure nobody else came down that aisle.
You were at the end of it now, reading the back of a tin as though the back of a tin had ever decided anything.
Jorund set the basket down on the shelf. He did not cross the floor, because a man of his size crossing a floor is a decision made for the person standing in front of him, and this was not going to be that kind of decision.
"You took the house on the north road,"
he said.
"I know. I am not going to pretend I don't."
His voice came out flat, which was what happened when the thing behind it mattered.
"There is something I have to tell you. Then you will want to go home, and I will let you go."
The wolf pushed forward behind his eyes. He put it back.