[Nell’s POV]
The marble chess set Oren carved for the boys collects dust on my kitchen table for three days. Every morning I wipe the counter around it like a landmine, and every morning my fingers drift close enough to the carved knight to feel the ghost of the hands that shaped it.
Three days of walking faster when I cross the compound, my neck burning each time I pass his cabin. The workshop saves me—yarn doesn't have opinions about my choices, and needles don't watch me with steady brown eyes that turn my sternum into a construction site.
"I've been up three nights on this." Sable holds up her tangle of dark green wool with the pride of someone defending a doctoral thesis. "It's a scarf—well, it will be a scarf, once it stops looking like something a cat fought and lost."
"You dropped a loop in the fourth row." I point without looking at the project because looking means seeing the color she chose—his color—and my throat closes around something I can't swallow. "Hand it over, I'll show you."
"Do you think he'd actually wear a scarf?" She drops onto my floor cross-legged, needles extended like an offering. "He doesn't seem like a scarf person—maybe gloves would be better."
"A scarf is good, Sable." My hands demonstrate the correction and they are steady, because I've been performing steadiness since she announced her plan to marry this man. "He'll wear it."
"You really think so?" Her face opens—no guard, just a woman who has poured three sleepless nights into wool for a man who will thank her kindly and mean none of what she needs. "I want it to be perfect."
"That cable border you taught me—doubled or single?" She turns the scarf over in her hands. "I want it to hold the shape."
"Doubled." I keep my eyes on the stitches because the alternative is looking at her face, which is doing something so open it could power a small city. "He won't know what hit him."
She bumps my shoulder and grins wide enough to crack the room open. "What would I do without you—burn through a lot more yarn, probably."
Survive, probably—sleep through the night, love a man without your best friend's hands shaking inside her sleeves. I laugh because the alternative is a sound she cannot hear me make, and her grin hollows me so thoroughly I'm amazed she can't hear the echo.
After she leaves, the compound darkens in stages—mess hall, border posts, Maren's light, and last, his window. I watch it blink out from behind my curtain like a woman with no business memorizing a man's sleep patterns from fifty yards.
The twins breathe through the thin wall. I lie in the dark and my body becomes a compass with two norths—one pulling toward the man who carries a letter that could end us, one pulling east through pine-dark air toward a door I have no right to open.
I get up—going for a walk, that's what this is. My feet walk past the mess hall, past Maren's porch, and stop at Oren's cabin with the directional honesty my mouth has refused for two years. Three knocks, five seconds of silence, and I should turn around.
The door opens and he looks like he hasn't closed his eyes either—hair pressed flat on one side, shirt half-buttoned, moonlight catching his collarbone through the pines. Neither of us speaks for a beat too long.
"I told myself I wouldn't come here." My voice belongs to someone braver, or possibly dumber.
"I know." He doesn't move from the doorway—doesn't step forward, doesn't retreat. Just holds the space and waits, the way he has every day since I arrived shaking in a hatchback.
"Sable spent three nights knitting you a scarf." My nails press crescents into the doorframe. "Dark green—she asked me to help fix the dropped stitches."
"Nell." My name, stripped bare on an exhale, and the sound of it does something to my knees I won't be forgiving anytime soon.
"She asked if you'd wear it and I said yes." I blink hard. "I sat on my floor and fixed her dropped loops and told her it was perfect, and my hands shook the entire time."
"I know." His knuckles have gone pale where he grips the door, and I realize the steadiness I've been envying for two years costs him something too.
"This isn't fair to anyone." My voice splits on the last word. "Not to her, not to you, not to whatever this is."
"Fairness has nothing to do with what's happening between us, and we both know it." His eyes hold mine and the steadiness of them turns my pulse into something audible.
"That's the most irresponsible thing you've ever said to me." My hand is on the doorframe and I haven't stepped closer but my body is already across the threshold.
"You walked here, Nell." He says it without judgment, without triumph. "Across the whole compound, past every turn that would've taken you home."
"Don't." The word barely clears my lips, and I swallow around the rest. "Don't make it sound like a decision."
"It was a decision." Same quiet honesty, the voice that never rises because it's never needed to. "You made it and you're standing here."
Then my hand is on his chest where the shirt gapes and his heartbeat slams against my palm—not steady, not calm, not the Oren the compound sees. He's been standing in the same fire, burning quieter.
I kiss him in the doorway and the world rearranges. Not the jagged pull I carry around Rhys—not the thing with teeth that shreds and leaves wreckage. This is the tide answering the moon, the gravity pulling since a grey wolf pressed its nose to my car window and rewrote us both.
His hands find my waist and I come apart at a seam I didn't know I had. What opens isn't a wound—it's a door I've been standing behind for two years with my fist raised, pretending I wasn't about to knock.
Later moonlight through pine slats, my cheek against his chest, his heartbeat slow under my ear. His fingers trace absent patterns on my shoulder, and through the door Ash is curled outside the cabin door, still for the first time in days.
"I can hear you thinking." His voice rumbles through his ribs and into mine. "The mattress is practically vibrating."
"That implies organized cognition." I trace his collarbone with one finger. "This is more like watching a building burn and critiquing the architecture."
"There are two, Oren." My forehead presses harder against his skin. "One lied to me for months and I can't hate him, and one is you, and my best friend is fifty yards away dreaming about a scarf she knitted with her own hands."
His hand stills on my shoulder for a breath, then resumes the same unhurried pattern. "I know."
"I don't know how to do this." My voice comes out half its usual size, muffled against warm skin. "Any of this."
"You don't have to know tonight." His lips press against the top of my head—once, brief, the kind of gentle that demolishes.
Across the compound, in a cabin where dark green wool sits half-finished on a chair arm, Sable sleeps with steady breath and no dreams. And I lie here doing math that will never balance, in arms that make me forget I was ever any good at arithmetic.