“Sometimes we don’t get what we want, Skye,” she’d said. “That’s just life.”
But the next morning, I’d found the bear beside my pillow, its plush body still warm from being clutched tightly on the walk home.
My brother had stood in the doorway, dark circles under his eyes, coins still clutched in his fist.
“I spent all my savings to finally grab it,” my brother had said, his face beaming with pride despite his obvious exhaustion. “Took me thirty- seven tries and the arcade owner almost kicked me out when they closed.”
“You’re amazing, brother!” I’d exclaimed, leaping from bed to tackle him with a hug.
He’d ruffled my hair, chest puffed out with pride. “Of course I am! I can do anything. Whatever Skye wants, I’ll get it for her. I’ll protect you forever! That’s what big brothers do.”
I thought he’d forgotten that promise, forgotten the bear and what it represented. But now as he held that teddy bear, turning it over in his hands, his expression crumbled more and more until he pressed it to his face to muffle a sob.
For the next three days, my brother didn’t come back to visit me in the hospital. But contrary to his usual pattern, he didn’t visit Selene in her hospital room either, though she’d been admitted for observation after the “incident.”
Selene called him many times. I could hear her increasingly frantic voicemails echoing through the house as he played them on speaker, his face impassive.
“Ethan, baby, why aren’t you answering? I need you… The doctor says the baby is fine but I’m so scared…”
“Ethan, please! I’ve called the Pack office and they said you haven’t been in for days. Where are you? Are you with *her*?”
“This is so typical! I’m in the hospital carrying your child and you’re ignoring me tor that psychotic sister of yours!”
My brother deleted each message without responding, muttering under his breath, “Lying bitch.”
He was right–he wasn’t working at all. He hadn’t left the house since returning from the hospital.
+25 Bonus
Every day he just stared at that teddy bear, turning it over and over in his hands, lost in memories. He barely ate, barely slept. Dark circles formed under his eyes, his stubble grew into an unkempt beard.
On the second day, he dug into the storage closet and pulled out a dusty box labeled “FAMILY.” Inside were old photographs, carefully preserved.
Pictures of our family of four–Mom with her bright smile, Dad with his strong hands on our shoulders. Pictures of me growing up–my first tooth loss, my first shift at age five (earlier than most pups), the fishing trip where I’d caught a trout bigger than Dad’s.
All the photos we’d taken together throughout the years were there, carefully sorted into albums. The last album ended abruptly with my middle school graduation, before Selene had entered our lives.
That afternoon, while he was sorting through these memories, my brother received a phone call from the investigator he’d hired. He put it on speaker as he continued examining the photos.
“Alpha Ethan, we’ve made progress,” the investigator reported. “We found the person who took the necklace from the clinic. A Beta named Marcus from the Eastern Ridge Pack. He admitted that a female wolf paid him five thousand dollars to retrieve it. Said she told him it was a family heirloom that had been mistakenly left behind.”
My brother’s hands froze on a photograph of me at age seven, missing my front teeth. “And?”
“We traced the bank transfer to an account belonging to Selene Winters. No question about it.”
