Erica didn’t know what to say. Too many thoughts crowded in, too many to keep track of. So, driving on Crescent Lane was just a way of signaling their arrival in Tolstone? Coming to the lake had nothing to do with her. Coming to this town had nothing to do with the house she now owned, the one she thought her mother had wanted too.
But then, why wouldn’t her mother want her to see Cole? Why keep them apart if Cole wanted to see her? Why didn’t she tell Erica?
She dropped her head into her hands as Cole continued.
“I never wanted to leave Decatur. I didn’t want to leave you and your mother, but the situation we were in didn’t allow you to come with me.”
At this, she sat upright. “What are you talking about? What situation?”
Cole swallowed hard and chose his words carefully. “I know Dominic told you about wolf shifters… About what this town is really for. This may be a bitter pill to take, but… I’m just like Dominic. Older, of course, but just the same.”
A shifter. Her father was a shifter.
“Holy shit,” she whispered. She searched him over for any sign to validate his claim, just as she had looked him over for any resemblance to herself when they were standing in the police station.
“I have five in my pack. When I had to leave Decatur, I only had three. It was just me, Ronan, and Jaime.”
“Jaime,” she whimpered pathetically. That Louisiana man who owned Lunar Lantern was a subordinate shifter to her father? She already knew he was a shifter, but she had no idea that he belonged to her father’s pack. He was right. This was a bitter pill to take, and it sat heavily in her stomach.
“Yes. He met Gwen when we came here, and we took in a loner a few months back. You might meet Lincoln someday, if you haven’t already… But when I was in Decatur, we had almost eight in our pack. Hunters came, and they were slowly picking us off. We had to leave, and Dominic’s father had accepted our petition to come to Tolstone, but there was so little room available. You and your mother would have had to either stay with Ronan and I in a studio apartment or lodge with Dominic’s family.”
Apart from the startling confession that there were people out there who hunted wolf shifters, the possibilities of what could have been made her dizzy. She might have grown up alongside Dominic and all of these shifters. How different her life would have been if she had grown up in Tolstone.
“So, why didn’t we come with you?”
Cole continued to struggle, as if the pain and hardship were still fresh. “Your mother and I… Erica, I loved your mother. I loved both of you more than life itself, but when this hunter threat came around, we were already having some trouble, and your mother refused to come with me. I was prepared to stay in Decatur, to let Ronan take Jaime and leave while they still could, and I would protect my family. But your mother wouldn’t let mestay either. She didn’t accept the pack or my role as alpha. She didn’t want you to be brought up in that life. My kind of life.”
“Why?” The word came out so softly, spiked with so much misery that Erica wasn’t fully convinced that it came from her at all.
Cole ran his hands through his hair, and she could see the gray and silver roots that matched around his ears beginning to show. “Your mother didn’t understand, and I waited too long in our relationship to explain. She hated it when I got up in the middle of the night to take care of an issue with the pack. Some days, I wouldn’t come home until after she had put you to bed, and she didn’t like how I couldn’t be a more active father and husband. She was always independent, but when she needed me the most… I wasn’t there for her.”
Erica looked at the patch of grass beyond the tips of her sneakers and thought of how lost and alone she felt when Dominic left early that morning, and how much she wanted him to stay. She could understand her mother’s plight, but not the decision to give it all up completely. Her mother was willing to raise Erica without a father because he was an alpha shifter, something, according to Dominic, that couldn’t be helped. He was born into that role. Did her mother understand that, or did she just not want to understand?
“I fought her for so long, trying to work something out… But you know your mother. When she decides on something, it’d take an act of God to get her to change her mind. And God wasn’t on my side… So, I left with the others, and when you were a little older, your mother reached out to me and wanted to…” Cole’s voice trailed off as if he didn’t want to confess this next part.
“Tell me.”
It took a moment for him to find the right way to explain it. “When there’s a mixed pair, like your mother and I, or like Jaimeand Gwen, sometimes there’s a chance that their children will… She wanted to see if you took after me or not.”
Her mind drifted back to Madison and how her mother was human, but her father was a wolf shifter. That could have been Erica.
“But I’m not.”
“Correct. You’re not.” She couldn’t ignore the slight twinge of disappointment in his voice that she wished wasn’t there. “But only an alpha can recognize the early signs of a child who will later become a shifter. That’s the only reason your mother brought you to Tolstone as you were growing up. When she was satisfied that you wouldn’t turn, she stopped bringing you.”
Erica laced her fingers in her lap and felt the bones of her knuckles. “If I had been… like you, would she have left me here?”
“I don’t know. We never needed to make that decision. I don’t know what she would have done.”
Erica’s entire understanding of her life and her childhood was obliterated in just a few short minutes. This whole time, she thought her father was the one who’d left them, who’d torn apart their happy threesome too soon. The truth was far from it. Her mother was the wedge, keeping her from knowing Cole and learning about shifters. Her childhood hero, her idol, the woman she looked up to and aspired to, had been the villain this whole time.
Suddenly, Cole didn’t deserve her wrath, but who did? Her mother? Shifter hunters? Maybe if they’d had just a little more time to work things out, they could have been a happy family. What if Cole had fought harder to keep them together? Why hadn’t he fought harder to stay? Why hadn’t he fought harder to be part of her life before it was too late? Why hadn’t her mom told her any of this when it mattered?
“I want to go home,” was all she could manage to say.
Then again, was her home a lie? Did her mother actually care about that place? It was just another piece to the ultimate deception. How could she go home after learning what its true significance was? It wasn’t something precious they’d shared anymore. It was just a place they drove past to give the signal that they were in town.
“Listen,” Cole began, “I know there’s a lot you have to think about, and I don’t expect things to ever be great between us. I missed out on all of your life. I’ll never get back those years. I’ll never get the chance to see you in a prom dress or interrogate your first boyfriend or help you with your homework. But I’m here now. Everything happens for a reason. I just hope that whatever does happen between us, you know that you can count on me to be there for you. Not just as the sheriff of Tolstone, but as… as a friend and someone who cares deeply about your well-being.”
