His fingers closed around mine, warm and solid, and something inside me… didn’t stop hurting, but it stopped free-falling.
“I’m sorry,” I said, but it came out wrong. Too small for what it meant.
Daniel’s grip tightened once. “I know.”
The words shouldn’t have helped. But they did—because he didn’t sayit’s okay.He didn’t pretend it was less than it was. He didn’t try to fix it.
He just acknowledged the grief like it was real.
Like it mattered.
I swallowed hard. “You talk about her like you’ve… made peace.”
Daniel’s mouth twitched, almost humorless. “I’ve had practice and besides I was also a mess then.”
“I can barely make it through breakfast without feeling like I’m stealing it.”
Daniel turned his head toward me slowly, expression steady but sharp with understanding. “You’re not stealing anything.”
“It feels like it.”
“I know.” He said it simply. Like he’d lived it. Like he’d watched men in his pack try to outrun grief and fail. Like he’d failed himself. “That’s the mind’s favorite trick after loss. It convinces you that surviving is a betrayal.”
I swallowed, throat raw. “And you’re saying it isn’t.”
“I’m saying your wife loved you,” Daniel said. “And if she loved you the way you talk like she did, she didn’t want you to rot in a house full of ghosts.”
The words should’ve made me angry.
Instead they made something inside me crack.
A sound slipped out of me before I could stop it—half laugh, half sob—and I turned my face away fast, ashamed of the noise.
Daniel didn’t comment on it. Didn’t flinch.
He just held my hand tighter.
Strong. Steady.
Alpha.
“You’re trying,” he said quietly. “I can see it. Even when you think you’re failing.”
I blinked hard, stared at the flowers because if I looked at him too directly, I was going to lose whatever control I still had left.
“I don’t know how to make room,” I admitted. “Everyone keeps saying it like it’s… a simple thing. Like you just move a chair and suddenly there’s space.”
Daniel’s voice went softer, but it didn’t break. “It isn’t simple. It’s slow. It’s ugly. Sometimes you take one step forward and six back.” His thumb brushed over my knuckles once, grounding. “But you don’t do it alone.”
I finally looked at him.
And for the first time, I saw it—not just grief in him, but the way he’d learned to hold it without letting it drown him. The way strength wasn’t the absence of pain, but the decision to carry it anyway.
“How did you keep leading after she died?”
“I didn’t have a choice,” he said. “The pack needed an Alpha. Evan needed a father. The territory needed someone to stand between it and everything that wanted to tear it apart.” His jaw clenched once. “So I stood.”
“And it didn’t destroy you?”
