Oren is at the lake, not fishing—just sitting on the flat rock with both hands on his knees, rod untouched beside him. His hands aren't moving, and in two years I have never seen Oren's hands still. The stillness tells me more than Maren could have.
I sit beside him. The stone is cold through my trousers and the lake stretches flat and green ahead of us, ringed by trees that cut the wind.
"Maren told you." Not a question. His profile is all angles—cheekbones, jaw, the rigid line of his neck.
"Before I finished my tea." His jaw works once, a single flex of muscle. "She's thorough."
"I need to tell you everything." I wait until he turns his head. "Not the version, not the shape—all of it."
"Then tell me." The way he says everything—plain, unhurried, braced for weight he's already decided to carry.
So I do. Harlan's orders—the prophecy, the heirs his bloodline hadn't produced in generations, the daughter-in-law who was expendable once the children arrived.
Rhys's mission: retrieve the children, neutralise the mother. The letters he wrote instead, keeping Harlan's wolves chasing ghosts south while I planted tomatoes in a compound that didn't know what it was sheltering.
Oren's eyes stay on me. He doesn't interrupt, doesn't give me the mercy of a question that would let me rest between confessions.
"Rhys came to take my children." The words taste like copper. "The witness story, the break-in—none of it was real. He built the lie to get close enough to finish the job."
"And instead he stayed," Oren says quietly. "Wrote the misdirections. Kept Harlan looking south." He's assembling it piece by piece, the way he does everything.
"That's not the worst part." My nails are cutting crescents into my palms and I make myself unclench them.
"Tell me the worst part." His voice doesn't change, doesn't brace, and somehow that absence of preparation is worse than flinching.
The lake is very still. Somewhere in the trees a bird calls once and stops, as if it reconsidered.
"The night I left the Adler house, Callum came home from a party where his father humiliated him publicly." My throat works around the words. "He turned it on me—table, chairs, wall—and his wolf came forward and I knew there was no ceiling on it."
"Nell." My name in his mouth, low and steady, and nothing after it—just the name, held out like a hand.
"Something happened—a heat, inside me, the thing I've never understood." I stare at the water because looking at him will break whatever is keeping my voice functional. "I had a knife. I don't remember reaching for it."
His breathing doesn't change. "When it was over he was on the kitchen floor and I stepped over him and never looked back."
The silence goes on long enough for the light to shift on the water—gold to something cooler, the trees' shadows stretching.
"The break-in was a lie Rhys built to keep me from falling apart." My hands grip my own knees hard enough to ache. "The pack found what it found because someone made sure that's all they'd find."
"Every good thing I've built here—the workshop, the boys, everything I've become inside these walls—sits on top of a secret I was too afraid to share with the man who gave me the ground to build on."
My voice cracks on the last word. Oren is looking at the lake again, hands still on his knees, and a heron stands in the shallows to our left with the patience of something that has nowhere else to be.
The quiet stretches until it stops being uncomfortable and becomes something else. The heron doesn't move, and neither do we.
"Would he have killed you?" Oren's voice is low and unhurried, the same tone he uses with wolves that need space. "That night. If whatever happened inside you hadn't happened first."
"Yes." I've turned that night over so many times the edges are smooth. "Without question."
He nods once—slow, absorbing it the way stone absorbs rain. "Then you survived." No emphasis, no careful gentleness. "And I have never once needed you to be anything other than a survivor."
My chest folds inward and I press my lips together and blink hard at the lake. Everything is holding still—the water, the air, Oren—and that sameness lets me breathe.
I reach for his hand. My fingers find his on his knee and close, and his hand turns under mine and holds on—firm, warm, the grip of a man who has been waiting to be asked.
My head finds his shoulder. The wool of his jumper is rough against my temple, pine and cold water, and for a while neither of us speaks because there is nothing left to hide behind.
The light keeps changing—gold goes grey goes soft—and the heron lifts off from the shallows, crossing the lake on wings that don't seem to hurry.
"Do you think he'll be alright?" My voice comes out quiet against the wool, smaller than I intend. "Rhys."
"I don't know." No pretence, no comfort he can't back with certainty. That honesty is the thing about him that makes the ground feel level.
I nod against his shoulder, then straighten and look at the flat water, the abandoned rod, the rock where he once stood behind me to guide my casting arm.
"I think I'd like to learn to fish properly." My voice sounds almost normal—raw at the edges but standing upright. "Not the disaster from last time. Actually learn."
The corner of his mouth moves—not quite a smile, but the architecture of one. "I'll teach you tomorrow."
"Tomorrow sounds good." I squeeze his hand once, the way you close a book you'll come back to, and stand.
Doris has the boys on her porch—Rowan stacking wooden blocks with the focus of an engineer, Ash trying to eat one. I scoop them both up and the weight of them rearranges everything inside my chest into a shape I can carry home.
Dinner is potatoes, greens, the last of the bread. Rowan eats everything placed in front of him. Ash drops half his food on the floor and stares at me as though I'm the one who should be embarrassed about it.
Bedtime goes the way it always goes—Rowan down in minutes, body going soft mid-story. Ash fights sleep with the fury of a child who considers it a personal betrayal, and I rub his back until his fists unclench.
The cabin is quiet, the fire burning low—orange coals, no flame, light that softens everything to shapes. I pull the green wool from my basket and the needles find their rhythm.
A small hat, green like the trees around the lake, like the jumper under my cheek an hour ago. The stitches build row by row and my hands know what to do without instruction—the one part of me that never lost its certainty.
I finish the last stitch as the coals settle and hold the hat up, turning it slowly the way my mother taught me. Once, twice, thumb running across every row, checking for the dropped stitches that leave a gap only visible when you look closely.
There are none. I set the hat on the arm of the chair and bank the coals and go to sleep, and for the first time in longer than I can measure, there is nothing between me and the dark that I haven't said out loud.