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“I had a very clear sense of authority at a young age.” She kept her face neutral. “My mother has never fully recovered.”

“Captain,” he said, in the tone he used for facts he was quietly collecting. She needed him to stop.

“Your turn.” She looked at him. “Something before Tor. Before the badge. You must have been a child at some point, statistically speaking.”

He was quiet for a moment — not deflecting, not considering, the same way he considered everything. “I got my first shift at seven. Early for a wolf. My father found me two miles from the house at dawn, sitting in the middle of a bramble patch, fully shifted, refusing to turn back because I liked how fast I could run.”

“Two miles. At seven.”

“He had to carry me home. I’d worn myself out.” A dry, quick, almost-smile, gone as soon as it landed. “I bit him on the way, not maliciously. I was seven and extremely committed to being a wolf.”

She laughed — startled out of her, the real kind. “You bit your father?”

“Twice.”

“And this is the story you lead with.”

“It’s the only one that ends with anyone getting bitten. I thought it earned the telling.”

The northern railing was where the boardwalk curved to follow the shoreline, and the ocean roared loudest here — which was why she’d come to this section in her first week and why she kept coming back. The volume worked like a kind of privacy. You could say things into it that you wouldn’t say in a quiet room.

They stopped at the railing without discussing it.

The ocean did its thing — dark and moving, present in a way that didn’t require anything back from her.

She kept her eyes on the water. “I left because someone else decided I should.” The words came slowly, as if she’d rehearsed a different version so often that the real one was finally available, in the dark, with the ocean covering it. “Fourteen. Middle of a school week. My mother told me to pack a bag, and by Sunday we were gone. She never said why. Not that week. Not the twenty-nine years after it.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I decided I’d control every uprooting after that.” She turned the ring she no longer wore out of habit. “Seventeen years of picking things so carefully — the job, the apartment, eventually the marriage — so I’d never again stand in a room and get told to pack a bag.”

They walked for a while. She’d lost track of where they were on the boardwalk. The ocean was loud on her left. The lampposts threw amber circles on the boards ahead of them.

“The blueprints looked right.” Her eyes dropped to the railing between their hands. “That’s the part that’s hard to explain. Nobody forced the marriage on me the way my mother forced that Sunday. I chose it. And it took seventeen years to realize the version of myself I’d been building toward was still somebody else’s invention. I just picked the architect this time.”

Drayce was quiet beside her. Not the processing quiet — the full kind, where he gave her words room instead of rushing to fill the space after them.

She’d told the coven some of this. The outline, anyway. What she’d told Garnet was the core. This was the full post-mortem — how it had been built, the choices she’d made that had led her there, and the parts she’d never once put in a deck. She hadn’t said any of it out loud to anyone.

She wasn’t sure why she was saying it now.

The debrief. Obviously.

Because the ocean was loud.

The ocean moved against the pilings with the low sound it made when it wasn’t performing for anyone.

“You came back.” He wasn’t making it mean more than it was.

“I came back,” she agreed.

They stayed in that for a while. The silence afterward wasn’t uncomfortable. Not the used-up kind. She hadn’t had one of those in a long time. The marriage had been full of silences, but they’d been the used-up kind, with words running out and leaving nothing behind. This was different.

She’d stopped tracking the fire in her palms. The absence of the tracking was its own answer.

They stayed at the railing longer than a debrief required.

She knew his hands rested on the rail next to hers — not touching, with a few inches of salt-bleached wood separating them. Close enough to see, yet far enough to pretend she hadn’t noticed. The ocean beneath them had a slight cross-current, with water flowing in two directions at once — similar to what sometimes happens near ward lines, though there was no ward line here. Only the water was doing something it wasn’t supposed to, and neither of them mentioned it.