POV: Evelyn

Grant valued my name at zero dollars and our refrigerator at twelve hundred.

The property schedule arrived at breakfast.

He claimed the house, both cars, his pension, the hidden Hawthorn account, and every piece of furniture worth keeping. He assigned me the credit-card debt, Sophie's medical bills, and a personal loan I had never seen.

At the bottom, beside CURRENT LEGAL NAME, he had written EVELYN QUINN in block letters and underlined Quinn twice.

Silas read the page over my shoulder.

“Do not eat the paper,” I said.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Your eyes turned gold.”

“The wolf has opinions about accounting.”

Ronan looked up from the stove. “Finally, a professional qualification I understand.”

He flipped a pancake. It landed partly on the burner.

Sophie pointed. “That one is Silas’s.”

“Why mine?” Silas asked.

“You eat the burned ones.”

He accepted this as a sacred duty.

The ordinary conversation steadied me. That was new. Grant had used breakfast to inspect receipts, criticize clothes, and decide whether my face looked “unstable.” At the clubhouse, a vice president ruined pancakes while an Alpha ate the evidence.

Maeve brought me a letter from Miriam.

The court had ordered temporary financial separation. Grant could no longer incur joint debt in my name, move money from identified accounts, cancel Sophie’s coverage, or represent himself as authorized to act for me.

My new account was active.

Mine.

The balance was modest: emergency support restored by the court, my first paycheck from reorganizing the Reapers’ repair-shop books, and eleven dollars and eighty-three cents transferred out of the account Grant had emptied.

I had kept the eleven dollars.

It was proof that empty was not the same as finished.

“Can we buy cereal?” Sophie asked.

“We have cereal.”

“The kind with moons.”

I opened the banking app.

For years, every purchase had required a calculation followed by fear. The numbers were still small. The habit of fear was not.

“Yes,” I said. “We can buy moon cereal.”

Sophie cheered as if I had announced a trip to Europe.

We went to the grocery store before the clerk’s office.

Silas tried to follow at a respectful distance with a cart. Sophie put him in charge of coupons instead.

“This one says two boxes,” he said.

“We only need one.”

“Then the coupon is issuing an unreasonable demand.”

“You command an entire wolf pack.”

“They are easier than coupons.”

At the cereal aisle, Sophie selected the box with purple moons and silver stars. I checked the price automatically, then checked my account.

The purchase would not endanger rent. It would not trigger an interrogation. No one would hold the receipt beneath a kitchen light and ask why happiness cost forty cents more.

I put the cereal in the cart.

My throat tightened.

Silas did not ask why. He placed an ordinary box of oats beside it, giving me time to breathe without turning the moment into a ceremony.

At checkout, I used my own card.

APPROVED appeared on the screen.

One word. Green letters.

My knees almost failed.

Sophie hugged the cereal. Silas carried every other bag but left that box in her arms.

In the parking lot, he opened my car door.

“You did not buy me anything,” he said.

“I bought mushrooms.”

“Cruelty is not a gift.”

I laughed, and the receipt in my pocket stopped feeling like evidence.

Silas watched me, not smiling.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“That is a lie.”

“I am trying not to make your bank account about my feelings.”

“How many feelings?”

“An unreasonable number.”

I touched his wrist beneath the table.

His pulse jumped.

“You can be happy for me,” I said.

“I am proud of you.”

The words landed somewhere softer than praise should have.

I removed my hand before I forgot there were five other people at the table.

Ronan placed a black pancake in front of Silas. “For your unreasonable feelings.”

After breakfast, Miriam met me at the county clerk’s office to amend the divorce petition with a request to restore my premarital name.

Evelyn Reed.

I had not written it in seven years.

The letters looked too short on the form. Almost unfinished.

“You do not have to decide today,” Miriam said.

“I decided before I met Grant. I just forgot I was allowed to keep deciding.”

I signed.

Evelyn Reed.

My hand shook on the last letter.

“What about Sophie?” the clerk asked. “Are you requesting a name change for the minor child?”