The rock is warm from an afternoon of stored sun, and my knitting needles click a rhythm that almost passes for calm. I brought the green wool—baby hat, round three of getting the decreases right—because the lake is the only place where nobody needs me to be anything.
Oren's rock. The same flat granite where he stood behind me and guided my arm through a cast that sent my pulse into cardiac territory. I'm sitting on it now like a woman who makes excellent decisions, knitting a hat and pretending the view of still green water is the reason I came here alone.
It isn't. The reason has two faces and neither of them belongs to me, and the yarn slips through my fingers while my mind runs laps between a man carving wood on my porch and a man whose laugh rearranged my ribs at this very bank.
I hear him before I see him—the particular weight of his stride on the pine-needle trail, unhurried, followed by the soft pad of enormous paws. Ash appears first through the tree line, grey and gold, nose low, and behind him Oren walks with a rod over one shoulder.
He doesn't ask if he can sit. He just does—three feet to my left, rod across his knees, eyes on the water. Ash circles twice and drops between us with a huff.
The quiet stretches. My needles click, a heron lifts off the far bank and resettles, and the light goes amber through the birch canopy while neither of us speaks.
"Rhys." He says the name without looking at me, the way you'd mention weather. "You alright?"
"Define alright." I loop yarn over the needle and pull through. "I invited him to dinner—nobody got stabbed, so by my family's standards, a triumph."
"I'm asking if the distance you set is holding." His voice is low, steady, the voice he uses when he's not going to repeat himself. "Whether you feel safe."
"I don't know what I'm doing, Oren." The admission comes out before I can knit it back in. "With any of this."
"Nobody ever does." He picks up a flat stone from beside his boot and turns it between his fingers, thumb tracing its edge. "Not with the things that matter."
"That's not helpful." My needles go still in my lap, and I look at him sideways because looking straight on is too much.
"It wasn't meant to be." He sets the stone down with a quiet click against granite. "It was meant to be honest."
I stare at the half-finished hat and the green wool blurs at the edges, and when I blink the lake sharpens again.
"Why do you keep pulling away from me?" Not the polite version—the real one, direct, stripped down, the way he does everything. His full attention turns on me and the weight of it presses against my sternum.
"Not the answer you've rehearsed." He holds my gaze, steady and unblinking, and the directness of it pins me to the rock. "The real one."
"Because Sable loves you." My mouth is dry but the words are clear. "And I won't be the reason she gets hurt."
"Sable is stronger than you think." His jaw works once around something he doesn't say. "She's one of the bravest people in this compound."
"It doesn't matter how brave she is." I set the knitting down because my hands are doing something I don't want him to see. "Love doesn't care about strength, Oren. I watched her bake three practice cakes for your birthday—three."
"She spent hours on the icing because she wanted it perfect for you." I swallow hard enough to hear it. "I will not take this from her."
"You keep choosing for everyone except yourself." He doesn't raise his voice—Oren never raises his voice, which somehow makes every word land heavier. "You've decided what Sable can handle. What I should want."
"You're building walls and calling them kindness." His eyes don't leave mine. "And the only person locked behind them is you."
My molars find each other so hard my jaw sings. "You don't get to lecture me about walls. You've spent your entire adult life on a lake pretending you don't need anyone—three wolves and a fishing rod and a cabin so far from the compound you might as well be on another planet."
"We're not talking about me." His fingers have gone white where they grip his knees, but his voice stays level.
"We are now." I stand because sitting makes me feel cornered and I've had enough of that for one lifetime. "You built this existence around not needing anyone, and now you want to tell me I'm hiding?"
"Yes." One word, dropped like a stone into still water, and the silence that follows it is louder than anything either of us has said.
"I can't afford to want things." The sentence comes out quieter than I planned, scraped raw. "Wanting things before got me bruises and broken plates and a husband who punished me for having an opinion about dinner."
My throat closes around the rest and I have to breathe through it before the next words will come. "Wanting things here will cost me the only person who ran with me into the dark. Sable took my hand and said which direction, and I will not—"
My voice breaks on the last word. I press my lips together until they go numb and the lake swims in front of me.
Then Ash moves. The wolf rises with the slow, deliberate purpose of an animal making a choice it has considered carefully.
He crosses the gap between us and presses his full weight against my legs. My whole body flinches—a jolt straight through my spine, electric and involuntary, because the last time something large and warm closed the distance between me and nowhere to go, it ended in bruises.
But the wolf doesn't push. Doesn't pin. He settles against my shins, and his enormous grey head drops onto my knee with a weight that asks for nothing.
My hands are shaking. I can feel Oren watching, can feel the silence thickening around the three of us, and every nerve in my body screams two instructions at once—run and stay, run and stay—until the contradiction locks me in place.
My fingers find the wolf's fur before my brain gives permission. The coarse outer coat, then the impossible softness underneath, and the warmth seeps through my jeans into bones that have been cold for two years.
A sound leaves my throat that I didn't authorize—small, broken, barely a breath—and my vision blurs.
Oren stares at his wolf pressed against my body and his face does something I have never seen on him. Every layer of reserve stripped back until what's underneath is so exposed I have to look away, because looking at it will undo whatever thin thread is keeping me standing.
I step back. Ash's head slides off my knee and the wolf watches me with steady amber eyes that hold no judgment, only patience.
"I can't." Two words, barely a whisper, and they cost me more than anything I've said today.
I pick up my knitting with hands that won't cooperate, tuck the needles into the basket, and walk toward the trail without turning around. Somewhere behind me, Ash doesn't follow—because wolves, unlike people, understand that choosing someone and chasing them are not the same thing.