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Yes, I decided immediately. Riverside was more to me than a man or a relationship.

I drove down after work on a Friday, and my wolf woke up by degrees as I got closer and closer. She was grateful, sitting on her haunches inside me, tongue hanging out, the sweetest and most innocent part of me in some ways.

I had not done well by my wolf, I realized, but I didn’t feel guilt about this, not in the paralyzing way where I looked at the past and berated myself. Instead, I only felt that I was going to do better in the future.

My dad and I went out to dinner at Roma’s again. Walker greeted me again, and I grinned at him. He said that he could get used to seeing me here often, and I said I could get used to it, too.

It felt good to be here.

It felt like being home.

I ended up at the Sign of the Fang for an after-dinner drink, talking to a woman named Maisie Briggs, who I’d gone to high school with. We got on like teenage girls, talking about random gossip in the town, like who had ended up with whom and who had gotten divorced and who had left town and who had come skulking back.

I said it for the first time, aloud, “I’m thinking I might come skulking back, actually.”

Maisie raised her beer glass. “Well, cheers!”

I clinked my glass against hers. “Yeah? You think it would be okay?”

“Everyone figured, since she’s gone, you and Damian—”

“I don’t think it would be me and Damian, though,” I said. “You think it would still be okay?”

“Oh, hell yeah,” she said. “After all, how could you be with him after everything he put you through? Your best friend, after all.”

I nodded, feeling vindicated. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” said Maisie.

As I paid my bar tab and patted my pockets for the keys to the new rental car I’d gotten, I thought to myself that—at the very least—if I was going to be coming back here a few weekends a month, I was going to need a car.

I looked up to see Damian in the doorway of the Fang, blinking at me, his face twisting in obvious distress. He noticed me looking. He looked away.

I went back to the bartender, not Jimmy this time, some new younger kid I did not know. The bartender slid over my receipt to sign, attached to a little clipboard so it wouldn’t get wet on the bar, which had just been wiped down. I signed it, and when I looked up, Damian was at the end of the bar.

He met my gaze and then pointedly looked away again.

Okay. Well. I guess we weren’t speaking?

Fine.

I squared my shoulders, and I walked out of the bar.

It was only as I was stepping out of the Fang that I realized something strange. I hadn’t scented him. Usually, the first sign that Damian was around was his potent scent, and it went through me in ways that undid me, that made me crazy, that ignited my desire.

But not this time.

“Leona!” It was Damian’s voice.

I turned around.

He was coming down the steps in the front of the Fang. It was one of those old buildings, built two or three hundred years ago, rectangular, brick. Like lots of old buildings, it was a little crooked. If you stood back and looked at the doors and windows, everything seemed just a touch slanted. A set of brick steps went up to the front door. It hadn’t always been a bar, I supposed, but it had been a bar as long as I remembered. Everything in Riverside had some historical significance, though, having served as a hospital in the Revolutionary War or the post office for the town or the old Masonic Lodge. That one actually had the bas relief compass symbol and the all-seeing eye above the door.

He caught up to me. “I guess we should talk.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I was sort of hoping you wouldn’t come back.”