And yet one had just materialized.
I was already unsteady from the last few days. From the isolation of his house. From the way he had stripped me down—physically, yes, but more than that—emotionally, psychologically. I was still adjusting to the woman who had pressed her palms against stone and begged without flinching. Still adjusting to the realization that I had wanted to be denied. Wanted to be claimed.
Now that same woman was sitting at her aunt’s table while generational ghosts started whispering.
The disorientation stacked.
Part of me—the practical, disciplined part—offered an immediate solution: leave. Get through this conversation. Smile. Go back to the airport. Take the next flight to Charleston and fold this entire experience into something contained and survivable. I could treat it like a recalibration. A private awakening. A lesson in what intensity felt like.
I could return home sharper. More strategic. Choose men with edges but safeguards. Men who commanded rooms butdidn’t threaten to rearrange my internal landscape. Men who knew how to take control in curated doses.
I could tell myself that was growth.
That I’d learned what I respond to.
That I could now apply it intelligently.
But the thought rang hollow almost as soon as it formed. Because what had happened in the woods hadn’t felt like experimentation. It had felt like recognition. And retreat wouldn’t make me unchanged again. It would only mean I’d chosen containment over truth.
“I don’t know him,” Aunt Mabel said after a moment, answering the question I hadn’t quite formed. “Not personally.”
My shoulders loosened by a fraction. Thank God.
“But I know what he is.”
The kettle began to hum softly on the stove.
I forced myself to meet her eyes. “What does that mean?”
She considered me carefully, as though deciding how much truth I could tolerate in one sitting.
“You look just like her,” she said.
The shift in subject felt like stepping off solid ground.
“Like who?”
“Your mother.”
The words landed without drama, without flourish. They didn’t need either.
“In what way?” I asked, hearing the faint thread of defensiveness I hadn’t intended to reveal.
“Not in your face,” she said gently. “In the way you hold yourself when you’ve already decided something, but you’re still waiting to see whether the world will object.”
Heat crept up my neck.
Cassian said nothing.
The kettle whistled sharply. Aunt Mabel turned it off and poured water into three mugs, the ordinary rhythm of the motion somehow amplifying the weight of what was happening.
“There was a winter,” she began once she’d settled across from us. “Long before you were born. Before your mother had settled into the life everyone now thinks she’s always had.”
I wrapped my fingers around the mug without drinking.
“She met a man,” Aunt Mabel continued. “He wasn’t suitable. Not in the way that mattered to the people she moved among.”
“Suitable,” I repeated.
