She looks small in it. Tired.
But not broken.
Never broken.
I shut the door behind me and cross the room without a word. Her eyes follow me, wide and vulnerable, expecting the worst—a part of her still doesn’t believe she’s allowed to have this.
I sink into the nest beside her, and she doesn’t flinch. She watches me. Waiting.
I wrap an arm around her waist, the other under her knees, and shift until she’s tucked against my chest, her body molding to mine.
My scent wraps around her instinctively—warm and solid—and I start to purr. Low and steady. Her shoulders lose some of their tension.
She exhales.
And then she presses her face into my neck.
“Is this okay?” I murmur.
She nods.
I brush my fingers down her back, slow and rhythmic. “You wanna talk about what happened with him?”
A long pause.
“It’s over.”
Her voice is soft. Final.
I pull back just enough to look at her, brushing a piece of hair from her cheek. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she says again, this time with more certainty. “It needed to end. He had a piece of me once, and I think I needed to see that he didn’t have it anymore. I needed to say it out loud.”
I nod slowly, heart thudding. Because I want to believe her. Hell, I'm pretty sure she wants to believe herself.
But I saw the way she looked at him outside the rink. The way her whole body leaned toward him before she remembered to pull back. The way her voice cracked when she made him bleed with her honesty.
She’s trying to close the door.
But it’s not locked yet.
And that’s okay. I’m not here to push her into pretending it is.
“I’m proud of you,” I say instead, my voice low. “For going after closure. For not letting him decide your story.”
She looks up at me, something flickering behind her eyes—guilt, maybe. Uncertainty. A need to be understood.
“And if I hadn’t been ready to let him go?” she whispers. “If I’m not.”
I tighten my hold on her, not even thinking about it.
“Then we’ll find a way to make it work,” I murmur. “All of us.”
She blinks, surprised. Her eyes lift to mine, rimmed in the kind of sadness that only comes from hindsight. She gives me a small, broken smile.
“He was a playboy. I’m pretty sure he never had a real relationship before me—if you can even call what we had a relationship. My friends warned me he wasn’t the type to settle down. And before him, I wasn’t either. Or at least... I thought I wasn’t.”
She swallows hard, tears glistening at the corners of her eyes. “I thought I could change him. That being my scent match meant it would be some kind of fairytale ending, no matter what. I thought fate would do the work for us.”
