Bryan is back.
After ten years of silence, he just shows up in Silvercreek like it’s nothing. Like he didn’t rip my heart out and leave me bleeding under that oak tree. Like he didn’t make me promise to forget him and then vanish so completely, I sometimes wondered if I’d imagined our entire relationship.
I slap the file folder closed harder than necessary with a huff.
Fern appears in the doorway of my office, one hand braced against the frame and a concerned furrow between her brows. Her other hand rests on her rounded belly. She’s far enough along now that the pregnancy is impossible to hide, and the shifter-human hybrid growing inside her has accelerated the timeline considerably.
“Okay, what’s going on with you?” she asks.
“Nothing,” I reply, waving her off. “Just tired.”
“Uh huh.” She waddles into my office uninvited and lowers herself into the chair across from my desk with a small grunt. “Come on. Out with it.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose and reply, “I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“Try again.”
I meet her eyes and find nothing but stubborn patience staring back at me. Fern Ramos—Fern Jenkins now, I suppose, now that she’s married to Connor—might be human and relatively new to Silvercreek, but she’s impossible to bullshit. Occupational hazard of being a therapist, probably. She spent years in Manhattan helping trauma survivors untangle their worst memories, and that kind of experience teaches you to spot deflection from a mile away.
“It’s nothing,” I insist. “Really. Just some old stuff coming back up.”
She tilts her head, inspecting me with those too-perceptive blue eyes. “Would this old stuff happen to be about six feet tall with dark hair and a face like he’s been through hell and back?”
I groan and ask, “How do you know about that?”
“Connor mentioned someone new showed up today. Or not new, exactly. Someone who used to live here. He said the guy’s name is Bryan and that you two used to be close.”
Close. What a pathetic word for what we were. Close is what you are with a coworker you sometimes grab coffee with. Close is what you are with a distant cousin you see at holidays.
What Bryan and I had was something that burned so hot it left scars when it ended.
“That was a long time ago,” I claim. “We were kids.”
“You were twenty when he left. That’s not exactly a kid.”
“It feels like a lifetime ago.”
Fern doesn’t push, which I appreciate. She just sits there, present and patient, giving me space to say more if I want to. It’s a therapy trick, and I recognize it because I’ve watched her use it on anxious pack members a hundred times, but that doesn’t make it any less effective.
“He was supposed to be my mate,” I hear myself say. “We never made it official, but we both knew. The bond was there. We were just…taking our time.”
“What happened?”
“His family was killed by Cheslem wolves.” I’ve told this story before, to Luna and Ruby and a few others who needed to understand why I flinch whenever someone mentions his name. It never gets easier. “His parents and his little sister. All of them, in one night. Bryan was the only survivor because he was with me when it happened.”
Fern sucks in a breath. “God. That’s horrible.”
“He blamed himself. I could see it eating him alive in the weeks after, this guilt that had no logic to it. He kept saying if he’d been home, if he hadn’t snuck out to meet me, maybe he could have done something.” I stare at the pen I’m twisting between my fingers without remembering when I picked it up. “Three months later, he asked me to meet him in the woods. I thought he was finally ready to talk about us. Instead, he told me he was leaving and that I should forget he ever existed.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. No explanation, no goodbye kiss, no promise to come back someday. He just walked away. And I never heard from him again until today, when I saw him in the square, standing there like ten years hadn’t passed. Like he has any right to be here after what he did.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“No.” I shake my head firmly. “I looked right through him and walked away. Let him see how it feels.”
Fern is quiet for a moment. I can almost see the wheels turning behind her eyes, the therapist's brain working overtime to analyze and understand. Then she asks, “How did that feel? Walking away?”
