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Walker nodded slowly. “True enough, I guess.” He furrowed his brow. “You don’t want Damian, then? You two are scent matches.”

“He mated my best friend!”

He sighed. “Sorry. What you’re saying is, you’re angry with him.”

“He betrayed me,” I said. “And you’re asking if I want him?”

He looked away.

I took a drink of my wine.

Walker looked back. “So, then why did you come at all?”

“Closure,” I said again.

“Right,” he said softly.

“Maybe with… her,” I said into my wine glass. “Maybe I want to understand her in some way, or let go of whatever I feel towards her, or… I don’t know.”

“She was a complicated person,” said Walker. He touched his chest. “I was in love with her, once upon a time. I know that.”

“I was actually thinking about that time she dumped you, when we were up in the loft of the barn.”

“Oh, right, the first breakup,” he said, laughing under his breath.

Because they had dated again, maybe six month later, for an even shorter amount of time.

“She never told you about her diagnosis?” I said.

He raised his gaze to mine, very serious. “No.”

“But it makes things different, somehow, right? Why she didn’t want to settle down? Why she was trying to cram every experience she could possibly have into her life? Why she was so fearless?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But she did settle down, didn’t she? And they were mated at seventeen, and she was pregnant right away.”

I flinched, because I knew that, because I remembered Damian telling me that, that she was pregnant, and that things had changed, and that—

I banished that memory, not wanting to relive it.

“So,” said Walker, “was she trying to live a full life before she died of that disease, or just before she knew she had to mate the cyning?”

I licked my lips. “You think she was planning it? That she intended to do it all along?”

“I’m not sure she had a choice in the matter,” said Walker. “You don’t know the way her father was about her and me dating.”

“Yes, I do,” I said. “Disguised racism, probably.”

“Oh, not that disguised,” he said, making a face.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He shook his head. “All I’m saying is that old Hank Hardesty had ideas about his daughter’s future, and maybe he forced the whole thing.”

“You think her father made her throw herself at Damian?” I said.

“You say he betrayed you, but by all accounts, she was begging for his bite. She was an omega in heat, and he was an alpha, and she was begging. That kind of thing is hard to resist.”

“I heard this story, too,” I said. Damian had cried. I had cried. You know who hadn’t cried when she talked to me about it? Opal. She had said she was sorry, but she had not sounded sorry.