Chapter Nine
MICAH
I saw her picture on a Thursday.
Dean had come to the office — Isaac had invited him, and I'd been in the same space for the first time, watching them together and understanding, with the particular precision I applied to things I needed to understand, that this was real.
Whatever Isaac had with Dean Grant was not a board convenience or a biological accident that had been managed neatly.
It was a real thing. Isaac was more relaxed than I'd seen him in years, and Dean was watching him with a quality of attention that I recognized from the inside — the kind that meant someone had gotten past your perimeter without you quite knowing when.
I was glad for him. It was also complicated, the way several things at once were always complicated, and I was sitting with that complexity like I sat with most uncomfortable things: precisely.
Then Dean put his phone down on the conference table and said, "I need to tell you both something."
Isaac looked at him. I looked at him.
"There's someone in my life," Dean said. "She's been in my life since before the match. I need you both to understand that I'm not walking into anything that leaves her out of the conversation."
"Tell us about her," Isaac said.
Dean picked his phone up and found a photo and turned the screen toward us.
I knew her in a fraction of a second.
White tea. Clean linen. The specific quality of absence that had been in my bed for two months.
Isaac made a sound that was mostly controlled, but not entirely.
"Avery Yates," I said. My voice came out wrong. Not unsteady — I had too much practice at steady for actual unsteady — but flat in a way that meant I was managing something.
Dean went very still. "You know her."
"I know her."
"How."
There was no version of this that was comfortable. "The Meridian Rooms. The night of your fundraiser. Before the match." I met his eyes. "She left before morning."
Dean stared at me for a long time.
Isaac had gone quiet in the particular way that meant he was processing.
I'd told him I'd been looking for a beta.
I hadn't told him her name because I hadn't known it yet.
The conversation we'd had about Avery's name two days ago hadn't included the detail that I'd seen her photo and connected the dot but hadn't told him yet — hadn't told anyone yet, because I was still working out what it meant.
"She didn't tell me," Dean said finally. "About you."
"She left before I woke up. She didn't know I'd been looking."
"She knew she'd met someone at The Meridian Rooms." His voice was very careful. "She wouldn't tell me who. She said it was over."
"It wasn't over." I said it before I'd decided to say it. "Not for me."
Dean looked at me, and I looked at him, and in the space between us was a person who was connected to both of us, who didn't know she was connected to both of us, who had been protecting herself from both of us in different ways.
"She's been pulling back from me," Dean said. "Since the match. She thinks an omega with a scent-match doesn't need a beta anymore, so she's been—" He stopped. His jaw was tight. "She's been trying to make herself irrelevant."
Something cold moved through me. "That's—"
"The logical conclusion of everything the law has told her she is," Dean said. "I know. I've been trying to tell her she's wrong."
Isaac cleared his throat. Both of us looked at him.
"She's connected to both of you," Isaac said, "neither of you has told her the other exists, she's currently under the impression that she has reasons to leave two separate situations, and right now she's probably somewhere managing all of this completely alone." A pause. "We should talk to her."
"She set the terms of any contact," I said. "She left for a reason."
"She left because she thought she didn't fit," Dean said. "Not because she didn't want to stay."
I thought about the folder on my desk. The open page. The particular expression on Avery's face that I hadn't seen because I'd been asleep, but that I could construct out of everything I'd learned about her in one night and two months of thinking about it.
She'd left because she'd seen proof of what the law thought about her.
She hadn't left because she wanted to.
"How do we reach out," I said, "without making her feel cornered."
"Through me," Dean said. "She trusts me. Or she did, before I scared her off." He looked down at his hands. "I'm going to tell her that I need to see her. That there's something I need to explain. And I'm going to let her decide what happens next."
Isaac and I both looked at him.
"This is her choice," Dean said. "All of it. We don't get to need her without letting her need back on her own terms."
It was the clearest thing anyone had said in this room in months.
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