I wait.
"I was afraid to get close to you," he says. "Not because I didn't care. Because I could see how easy it would be to love you. And I knew, I could feel it even then, that you were meant for Alex's pack, not mine. I didn't want to put myself in a position ofloving someone I'd have to let go." He looks at me directly. "I was trying to spare myself. And you paid for it."
I look at him.
He looks back.
"I know it's not enough," he says. "An apology isn't enough for what I left you in."
"No," I agree. "It's not." I pause. "But I'm not holding it against you."
He blinks.
"I'm not saying it was okay," I continue. "It wasn't. You could have done more, and you know it, and that's something you'll have to sit with. But I understand the fear of it. The fear of loving something you might lose." I don't look away. "I've been afraid of the same thing my whole life."
Jasper is quiet.
"I forgive you, Jasper," I say. "Not because you've earned it yet. But because carrying it is tiring and I'm done being tired. I'm ready to move on."
His expression cracks open, raw and unguarded, before he carefully rebuilds.
"Thank you," he says. The words come out rough.
"Let Arden help you," I say. "Whatever you're carrying about all of this—let him help you work through it. Or someone, if not him. But someone. You're a good person who made poor choices. That's fixable."
He nods.
I squeeze his arm once before I go back inside.
Eli is standing in the living room when I come back in. He looks better than Drake did when he arrived—no bond sickness, no fever, just that haunted look people get when they've crossed a line they can't uncross and haven't yet made peace with the new version of themselves on the other side.
Drake is still in his chair by the window. He looked up when Eli walked in and they've been existing in the same room without speaking, the weight of years and a broken bond and everything that happened between sitting between them like a weight neither of them is ready to touch yet.
Everyone else is gone, giving us space.
Eli looks at me.
"Can we sit?" I ask.
We sit on the couch, a cushion of space between us.
"I don't know how to say any of this," he starts.
"Just say it."
He's quiet, then it comes.
All of it. How he saw what was happening and chose the easier path. The comfort ban he enforced without pushing back. The nest he stood there and watched Ragon violate without saying the thing that needed to be said. The heat—he says that part, voice barely above a whisper, like saying it louder would make it worse. That he tried to leave. That Ragon barked him back. That he should have tried harder, found another way, done something other than what he did.
"I have to live with that," he says. "For the rest of my life. I know that. I'm not asking you to make it easier."
"I know," I say.
"I just needed you to know that I know it. Every part of it. I see exactly what I did and didn't do."
I look at him. At the face I spent five years trusting—the careful eyes behind the glasses, the jaw I watched tighten a hundred times when he was trying not to say something he thought better of.
I think about the night about eight months into my time with the pack when I got a call that my grandmother had passed. We weren’t close. We hadn't spoken in years. But it still hit me sideways, like the death of someone complicated always does. Ididn't cry at dinner. I didn't tell anyone. I just got quiet in a way I thought I'd successfully hidden.
