Chase looks at all of them. His expression carries weight of a man who has done everything he could and is living in the gap between that and enough.
"I'm sorry," he says.
He walks back to his car and we watch him drive away.
Nobody says anything.
Then Rhys's arms come around me. I turn into his chest and I cry in a way I haven't cried since the early days—full and ugly and completely undone. His purr starts and I feel the others close in around us. Malcolm's hand on my back. Finn's forehead against my hair from the side. Alex standing nearby, not touching, the flag keeping him exactly one careful step away again.
On the table the listing with the apple tree sits in the sun.
Four bedrooms. Two acres. A garden that would take a lot of work to reclaim.
Something permanent.
I cry until I'm empty and then I sit in the middle of my pack in the warm morning light and feel the grief of wanting something completely but not being able to have it yet.
Yet.
I hold onto that word with everything I have.
Yet.
Chapter 36
Alex
I watch them from the couch and I can't move.
Vee in Rhys's lap, hollowed out. Malcolm in the armchair with cold coffee and nowhere to put his anger. Finn on the floor with nothing to say for the first time I can remember.
This is because of me.
Not the registry or the broken system or Chase failing to find an angle. Me. The flag on my name that I put there with my own hands and would put there again, because Rhys wouldn't have survived prison and I knew it. I'd make the same call a thousand times.
But the cost of it is sitting in this room.
Rhys looks up and finds me watching. The lost quality in his eyes—I haven't seen that since the early months, before he trusted us, before he knew the world could have places in it that were safe. He worked years to get from there to here. Vee gave him the rest of it in weeks.
And the registry is going to take her away from him.
I get up and walk out the back door before anyone can notice. Before their scents pull me back.
The trees are quiet.
I call Arden.
He picks up on the second ring and knows from one word that something is wrong.
"The flag stays," I say.
A pause. "I'm sorry."
"If she's taken away from Rhys now," I say. "After he's had this. What happens to him?"
Arden is quiet longer than I'd like. "He might backslide. The calm she gives him isn't just comfort, it's regulation. If that's taken now—" He stops. "I don't know. It's not that he can't heal on his own, he can, he's shown that. But snatching her away is going to traumatize him."
"Did I make the wrong call that night?"
