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“Leona?”

I looked up, and there was Walker Norn. He was older. We all were. He used to have his hair in locs that skimmed his chin, but now it was cut short. He had a goatee. His warm brown skin peered out from beneath his dress shirt and above his tie.

“Walker!” I leaped out of my chair. “You still work here?”

“I run the place for the owners,” he said with a shrug. “Some summer wolves bought the place as an investment. They’re very hands-off, though, and I do all the work and make all the decisions. They just sign the checks.”

“Well, that sounds like it works out, then.”

He gave me a hug, but he whispered in my ear, “You probably should not have come back here.”

I pulled away, shrugging. “Closure? I guess?”

My dad was coming back to the table.

Walker noticed, and he greeted my dad, who greeted him. They shook hands, patting each other on the back. Walker turned back to me. “Hey, what are you doing later? We shut the doors here around nine, and if you wanted, we could wander down to the Fang, have a drink.”

“Oh, I’m not here to—”

“You should definitely do that, sweetheart,” said my dad. “I think it’d be good for you to see everyone.”

I nodded at Walker. “Okay, maybe for a little bit. But just for one drink.”

“One drink,” said Walker, giving me a smile. His expression softened. “Hey, Leo, you, uh, you look good.”

I felt myself blush. “You do, too,” I murmured.

DID I EVER find guys who weren’t Damian attractive?

I did.

It wasn’t the same, obviously, and I never acted on it, never once, because it wasn’t worth it, and my attraction to Damian was so much more intense and so much more all-encompassing, but I remembered one night with Walker, after Opal had dumped him.

We were out on the Marler farm, on the other side of the river. The Marlers had six kids and four of them were close to our age, while the other two were still younger. Their parents would agree to letting them have people over, and if these little get-togethers ended up as small parties—fifteen or sixteen kids—they didn’t seem to sweat this very much. They had a very kids-will-be-kids attitude, the Marlers did. Work hard, play hard, that kind of thing.

Anyway, this wasn’t exactly a party, but it was some kind of gathering.

Walker was up in the loft of the barn, and I found him. He might have been crying, but he stopped when he saw me. “Hey, you’re her best friend,” he called down to me. “You have to understand it better.”

I climbed up the ladder and sat next to him. “She said it was getting too serious,” I said. “You know how she is about that.”

“But why is she like that?” he said.

Easlings, I was realizing. It made sense in an awful way. Had her mother died of it? God, it had to be that. Had to be. And they had lied to everyone about that, then. Had that been Opal’s father’s idea? Maybe he didn’t want anyone to know his daughter’s genes were tainted. Maybe he’d forced her to hide it, maybe he’d kept his wife’s demise quiet because of that.

But yeah, if Opal had known she was going to die young, if she had known she couldn’t have any children, it made so many of the things she had done when were young make so much more sense.

Didn’t make me forgive her, though.

How could I?

Back then, I said, “She just doesn’t want anything too settled. She wants to be free. She wants to live and be wild and young and everything.”

“I’m not trying to stop her from doing that!” Walker threw his hands up in the air. “Can you tell her that?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t think it will matter.”

It was only this one moment between us, sitting next to each other on the loft, this moment where we looked at each other for too long, and I looked at his lips, and I thought about kissing a Black man, and I wondered about it, and then I felt like a racist piece of shit, but that didn’t stop me feeling curious either, because his lips were perfectly shaped and wide and dusky pink…