Useless.
I kick the door shut behind me with a little more force than necessary and let the silence press in. Here, there are no sirens or car horns or upstairs neighbors stomping around as though they’re dragging corpses in the middle of the night. The only sound is the creak of tired floorboards and the distant howl of the wind gnawing at the siding.
It’s the kind of quiet I used to dream about while shoveling sad salad into my mouth during clinic lunch hours, wedged between double shifts and men named Chad who strongly believe in ice baths, protein supremacy, and interrupting women; but now that I’m standing in it, it doesn’t feel peaceful. It feels…suspended. Unsettled, even.
Almost as though the silence is the town holding its breath while it decides what to do with the new omega who just dropped into its lap.
I toe off my boots and peel off my coat before tossing it over the back of the desk chair, then I kneel to start unpacking—not because I want to, but because doing something feels marginally better than standing here waiting for my brain to implode.
The bedside lamp flickers when I turn it on, casting a weak, jaundiced glow across the room. I frown at it, then begin to work methodically through my piles of stuff. There’s a spare set of sheets in the closet, but I made one tiny, overpriced splurge before the move and brought my own. They’re crisp white with subtle charcoal stripes, and still sealed in their plastic packaging.
Honestly, these sheets are the closest thing I have to emotional stability at this point.
I shake them out and make the bed corner by corner, pulling the fitted sheet tight with a kind of desperate precision. I tell myself that if I can just get this one thing neat—this one square of mylife to make sense—maybe the rest won’t feel like it’s collapsing in on itself.
Tomorrow, I’ll call the rental agency and ask,calmly, what the fuck is going on. Maybe they’ll fix it, maybe they won’t, but either way, I’m not burning energy on it tonight. I’ve already spent the day not sliding into a ditch, surviving Bev’s diner therapy, navigating Wolfe’s Hardware, and finding out I have an unexpected roommate who might bench press humans for fun if the size of his hoodie is anything to go by: my emotional reserves are officially scraped clean.
At this point, I’m running on caffeine, cold air, frayed omega nerves, and the sheer force of spite, so if anything else goes wrong, then I’m flipping this whole damn house into a snowbank and sleeping in the car.
But hey—on the bright side, at least here, no one knows what I’ve left behind.
No one in Iron Lake has seen the slow unravel of Emery Tate.
No one has watched me grind myself down trying to prove I belong in a clinic full of polished smiles, carefully neutral scents, and professional backstabs. No one here has witnessed the tragic comedy that is dating your direct supervisor—especially when he turns out to be married to his work, his ego, and in a surprise twist, a very real beta he somehow forgets to mention to everyone.
And no one here has seen how small I got, or how bone-deep burnt out I was by the time I packed up my life in a trunk full of emotional shrapnel and walked away without looking back.
Here, I’m not the girl who stayed too long in the wrong job with the wrong man trying to prove the wrong things.
I’m just the new physical therapist for a small-town hockey team.
And yeah, maybe the house is falling over and I’m apparently living with a ghost gym rat who can’t be bothered to show up, butstill. This is my reset. The clean slate, the try again. No gossip, no old reputations, no history clinging to me like bad perfume or stale scent markers: just a town full of strangers who don’t expect anything from me except maybe a hamstring stretch and a properly stocked tape drawer.
I don’t need peace.
I just needdifferent.
I pad back down the stairs, my muscles aching as I drag the fleece blanket off the back of the couch. It sags under me as I collapse, every cell in my body clocking out at once.
I stare at the rest of the bags, then look away. They can wait. I just need ten minutes. That’s all. Just ten minutes to sit down, to not do anything.
I don’t have to be productive. I don’t have to get everything in order.
I don’t have to fix my whole damn life in one night.
The blanket is soft, and warm, and smells faintly of pine and detergent… and yeah, maybe a little like the alpha who lives here. I don’tlovethat it smells like a man I haven’t met, but I also don’t have the bandwidth to be weird about it.
My instincts twitch, then settle. He isn’t here, looming over me: it’s just residual scent in fabric and furniture, not a live problem.
The house is still, and I glance around again. The hoodie is still watching me from the couch back like it knows how all this ends,and the longer I sit in this too-warm, too-quiet room, the more surreal it all feels.
Maybe the guy has gone out of town. Maybe he has a girlfriend. Or maybe—and this is the one I can’t quite decide how to feel about—maybe he knows I’m coming and just… doesn’t bother being here.
Is that rude? Dismissive? Weirdly polite? Is he giving me space, or just avoiding the whole situation like it isn’t his problem?
Hard to say.
Honestly, he might not have thought about it at all—which, if I’m being honest with myself, feels about right. That would track. That’s the kind of luck I have.
