“He's at Claire's tree,” he said. “He goes there sometimes. When things get heavy.”
“Claire's tree?”
“Mom's memorial.” Evan set down the spoon, pushed the bowl away. “There's this massive oak about a mile into the forest, east of Moon Clearing. Dad planted wildflowers around it after she died. Spread her ashes there.” He paused. “He doesn't talk about it much. But when he disappears for a few hours without telling anyone where he's going, that's usually where he ends up.”
Something tightened in my chest. Fifteen years of grief, and Daniel still had a place he went to sit with it. Still had a spot in the forest where he could be alone with everything he'd lost.
I understood that. More than I wanted to admit.
“Can you tell me how to get there?”
Evan studied me for a long moment. Those pale eyes, so much like his father's, weighing something I couldn't see.
“He might not want company,” he said finally. “That place is... it's sacred to him. Private.”
“I know. But I think—” I stopped. Started again. “I think maybe he's been private long enough.”
Evan's mouth twitched. Almost a smile.
“East trail from Moon Clearing. Follow the creek until you hit a boulder that looks like a sleeping bear. Turn left, walk another quarter mile. You'll know it when you see it.”
“Thank you.”
“Michael.” Evan's voice caught me at the door. “He's been carrying this alone for a long time. If you're going to be the one he finally shares it with... don't make him regret it.”
“I won't.”
I hoped that was a promise I could keep.
One momentI was hiking through dense forest, the next I stumbled into a clearing dominated by the largest oak I'd ever seen. Its trunk had to be fifteen feet across, bark so deeply furrowed it looked like the skin of something ancient and patient. Branches spread overhead like a cathedral ceiling, filtering afternoon sunlight into golden-green patterns that danced across the ground.
And beneath those branches, surrounded by wildflowers that shouldn't have been blooming this late in the season, Daniel sat with his back against the trunk.
He looked smaller somehow. Not physically. Daniel could never look small, built like he was carved from the same granite as the mountains. But something about the way he held himself, shoulders curved inward, head bowed, made him seem less like an Alpha and more like a man who'd been carrying too much for too long.
He didn't look up when I approached. Just said, “Evan told you where to find me.”
“He worries too much. Always has. Gets it from his mother.”
Daniel said it like it was a fact he’d lived with forever—fond, almost tired. Like Evan’s anxiety wasn’t a surprise to him, just another weather pattern in the pack. Another thing you learned to work around.
I followed his gaze and stopped at the edge of the wildflowers.
They shouldn’t have been there. Not like that. Late autumn didn’t grow color this loud, not in Hollow Pines. Purple and gold and deep crimson, crowded together in spirals that looked… deliberate. Not planted, exactly. Tended. Like the land remembered where hands had once been.
My throat tightened before I could stop it.
“This is where you scattered her ashes,” I said.
Not a question. Not because I knew for sure—because my body knew. The way it knew the smell of smoke in a house that used to be home.
Daniel’s exhale came slow. Controlled.
“This is where she asked to be,” he said. His voice didn’t break. It stayed steady, like he’d learned a long time ago how to speak around pain without letting it swallow him. “Clairewanted to stay in the territory. Said if she couldn’t stay with us, she wanted to at least stay close.”
The wordclosehit me like a bruise pressed too hard.
I didn’t sit at first. I just stood there, staring at the flowers like they might rearrange themselves into something that made sense. Like grief could be solved if you stared long enough.
