The knitting workshop smells like cedar shavings and the lavender sachets Doris tucks into every basket. I'm showing Jory's daughter a cable stitch when Sable appears in the doorway with an expression that could curdle fresh milk.
"We need to talk." She steps inside without waiting for me to finish the row. "Now, Nell."
"I'm in the middle of a lesson." I hold up the needles like courtroom evidence. "Give me ten minutes."
"I've given you four days." Every woman in the workshop suddenly develops a fascination with their own yarn. "Ten minutes turns into another fire pit chat with your new best friend, and I'm done waiting."
Jory's daughter glances between us with the wide eyes of a child who recognises adult weather. I set the needles down, smile at her, tell her to practise the twist, and follow Sable out before the door finishes closing.
"Three times this week." She holds up fingers, voice low enough that the compound can't hear but sharp enough that I flinch. "Three times I've watched you sit down next to the man whose father runs the pack you fled from."
My arms fold across my chest, mirroring hers—two women made from the same stubbornness standing three feet apart. "He's not his father, Sable."
"No, he's the brother of the man who put your head through a wall." The edges of her voice could draw blood. "Same house, same table where Callum carved himself into the golden son while the family clapped."
"Rhys wasn't clapping." My thumbnail digs into my sleeve seam hard enough that the thread groans. "He was getting his ribs broken while everyone applauded the performance."
"And that's awful—genuinely, Nell." She presses both palms against the workshop wall like she's keeping the building upright. "But awful doesn't mean safe. It means he grew up in the same house that made Callum."
"I know. But I choose to believe this means the opposite of what you think it means." My teeth find the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper.
"And that’s exactly your problem." She pushes off the wall and the temperature climbs. "He shows up with a story nobody can verify, keeps a scarf for three years like proof of decency, fix gates and stack wood until everyone forgets to ask why he came."
"You sound like the Adler pack." The words leave my mouth at the same moment my brain screams to catch them. Sable's chin jerks back like I'd thrown something at her.
"Judging him by blood—that's what they did to me." I push on because stopping now means the damage is done for nothing. "Decided what I was based on who I belonged to."
"I am not judging his blood, Nell." Her voice goes quiet, which is infinitely worse than the shouting. "I'm judging his timing. A man appears two years later carrying the one object guaranteed to crack you open, and you don't find that suspicious?"
My hands ball inside my sleeves and I open my mouth to argue, but she cuts through before I get there. "You held his hand at the fire pit. Doris told me—you sat there and held his hand and didn't pull away."
My mouth opens, closes, opens again. The defence I'm assembling collapses before it reaches my teeth because she's right, and the reasons I gave myself that night dissolve under the honesty of her stare.
"He suffered too." The words come out barely above a whisper and I watch them land. "That's not nothing, Sable."
"It's not nothing." She nods, jaw softening for one second before it sets again. "But suffering doesn't make someone safe. Callum suffered too—and he took every ounce of it out on you with his fists."
The workshop door creaks and Jory's daughter peeks out, reads our faces like a weather report she doesn't want to be right about, and retreats. The silence between us stretches until the wind fills it.
"I'm not asking you to trust him." My voice barely holds together, thin at the seams. "I'm asking you to trust me."
"I trust you with everything I have." Her chin trembles once before she steadies herself. "I don't trust your judgement about men who remind you of what you survived."
She turns without another word and walks toward her cabin, spine so straight it could slice the air behind her. My hands shake and I press them against my thighs because the alternative is chasing her with nothing useful to say when I arrive.
She's not wrong—that's the part lodged in my chest, sharp-edged and immovable. Neither am I, and the gap between those truths is exactly wide enough to lose a friendship in.
Evening air hits my face when I finally cross the compound toward my cabin, hands stuffed in my pockets, hood up out of habit. My head is down, running Sable's words through their thousandth rotation, and I nearly walk straight into Oren's chest.
Pine and cold water and something underneath that makes my pulse lurch sideways hard enough to forget what I was thinking about. I step back fast enough to stumble on the uneven path.
"Steady." His hand catches my elbow and releases in the same motion, fingers there and gone. "You alright?"
"Fine. Just distracted." The word I've used as a shield since I learned to speak. "What's the boys' schedule tomorrow—Doris mentioned the creek."
"Morning walk, supervised." He answers the safe question, then waits for me to stop hiding behind them. "Maren's taking the older children too."
I keep going because stopping means standing in the silence with him, and the silence is where the trouble lives. "And the supply run—does she need counting help?"
"Be careful." Two words, stripped bare, and my spine goes straight. My jaw tightens around the response before I let it through.
"I don't need protection, Oren." My eyes meet his and hold. My nails press crescents into my palms inside my sleeves.
"I know." His voice drops into a register I feel at the base of my skull. "That's not what I meant."
Eighteen inches of cold air between us, carrying more charge than everything said above it. His eyes stay on mine and my ribs tighten around something I cannot afford to examine or feed, something with teeth and a pulse of its own.
Through Sable's cabin window, her laugh rises—bright, unguarded, the sound of someone who doesn't know I'm standing in the dark measuring the distance between my mouth and another man's. She said which direction and never asked why. She baked three practice cakes for this man's birthday.
I step around him, shoulder passing close enough to feel warmth without contact—a quarter-inch of charged air that my body will inventory for days. "Goodnight, Oren."
"Goodnight." The word follows me across the yard and I do not turn around, because turning means looking at him, and looking at him means something breaks in Sable's world. I will set this whole feeling on fire before I let that happen.
My cabin door closes behind me and the twins breathe through the thin wall—one rhythm steady, one catching every third exhale. I press my forehead against the wood and hold it there until my hands go still, and outside, Sable's light clicks off at the same moment Oren's clicks on.