"Goodbye, Ragon," I say.
He doesn't answer immediately. He just looks at me one last time, all the way. The way you look at something you're committing to memory.
"Goodbye, Vee," he says. "Take care of yourself."
I walk out.
Ragon
I sit in the empty room for a while after she leaves.
Chase was gone before she reached the door. I'm alone now with the furniture and a window that frames a courtyard where some bird pecks at nothing that matters to me.
She forgave me.
I don't know what to do with that. I thought I'd prepared for everything. Her anger, her coldness, her grief, the list of everything I did wrong delivered with the precision of someone who'd been organizing it for a long time. I prepared for all of it.
I didn't prepare for her walking in whole.
She sat across from me and said the worst thing I ever did to her wasn't Marie. It was the condition. And she was right in a way that went through every defense I had like they were made of paper, because she wasn't saying it to wound me. She was just saying it because it was true. She'd arrived at the truth on her own and she wanted me to have it.
That's not love, Ragon. It never was.
I sat across from a woman I told myself I loved for five years and let her show me the shape of what I actually gave her, and I didn't have a single word to say against it.
Because she's right.
I loved the idea of her. I loved what having her said about me. That I was a good pack lead, I provided well and I was generous enough to take in an omega even without the certainty of forever. I loved how she made the house work. I loved hercompetence and her warmth. How she laughed and how well she fit into our lives.
But I kept her at arm's length for five years because somewhere underneath all of it I never fully chose her.
And she knew.
She knew and she stayed anyway because she had nowhere else to go And I told myself that was okay. That provisional love was better than nothing. That she was fine.
I get up.
The hallway is the same grey carpet, the same fluorescent lights. I sign out at the front desk without really seeing the person behind it and walk toward the exit.
The door opens onto the parking lot.
I see her before I've taken three steps.
She's by an SUV, and she's laughing. Her head is tipped back, her whole face open, the laugh she never quite gave herself permission to have in my house. The large man beside her—enormous, scarred, a face that belongs to someone who has been through things I can only imagine—has said something that did this to her, and he's watching her laugh with an expression so naked and uncomplicated that I have to look away from it.
Next to him is Alex and the rest of his pack. Malcolm has one arm slung around her shoulders like someone who has decided this is where his arm lives now.
They look like a pack that has been a pack for years.
She glances up and sees me.
She doesn't flinch. Doesn't look away. Just meets my eyes across the parking lot with an expression that isn't triumph or pity or anything with an edge on it.
Just peace.
Then she looks back at her people.
I stand there longer than I should.
