He heads toward his room, then pauses at the doorway.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I believe her too. About being scared. About the shame spiral.” He looks at me. “It doesn’t fix everything. But it helps to finally know.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It does.”
He disappears down the hall.
I stand in the kitchen for a while, staring at nothing.
She told us why. After ten years of wondering, we finally know.
It doesn’t erase the hurt. Doesn’t undo the years of silence. But it’s something. A crack in the wall. A place to start.
I think about her sitting alone at that table. The way she looked when I glanced back. Broken and beautiful and trying so hard to be brave.
We left her there. All three of us. Because we needed to protect ourselves, because we weren’t ready, because the pack comes first.
But tomorrow, we’ll reach out. Give her the dates she paid for. Let her try to earn whatever comes next.
I head to my room. Lie down in the dark.
For the first time in ten years, I don’t have to wonder what I did wrong.
Turns out the answer is nothing. We did nothing wrong. She was just scared and young and didn’t know how to love us without losing herself.
I can understand that. I can work with that.
The question now is whether we can find our way back to each other. Whether the people we’ve become can fit together the way we used to.
I close my eyes.
For the first time in a long time, I let myself hope.
Chapter 9
Cara
Iwake up feeling like roadkill.
They left me. All three of them, walking away from that table while I sat there with mascara running down my face and cold filet mignon congealing on my plate.
I stayed at that table for twenty minutes after they disappeared. Couldn’t make myself move. Just sat there while servers cleared plates around me and other auction winners laughed with their dates. Mrs. Patterson walked by at one point, her expression a mix of pity and curiosity, and I wanted to sink through the floor.
Eventually Maeve appeared with a to-go cup of tea and a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Come on, honey. Let’s get you home.”
She didn’t ask questions. Just drove me to Grandma’s in silence.
Grandma took one look at my face, handed me a box of tissues, and said, “I’ll put the kettle on.”
We sat in the kitchen until midnight. I told her everything—what I said, how they reacted, the way they walked out one by one. She listened without interrupting.
“Well,” she said finally. “At least now they know.”
“They hate me.”
“They’re hurt. That’s not the same thing.” She squeezed my hand. “Give them time.”
I wanted to believe her. But the look on Nate’s face. The sound of the door closing behind them. I cried myself to sleep.
