Chapter 2
Theo
Imake it to the truck before I fall apart.
That’s something. That’s actually impressive, if you think about it.
Cara Donovan standing in the window. Honey-citrus scent drifting through the snow, those dark eyes locked on mine for the first time in ten years.
And I managed to nod like a normal human being and walk back to my truck without doing anything embarrassing.
My hands are shaking so hard I can barely get the key in the ignition.
I sit there in Eileen’s driveway. Engine running. Heat blasting. Trying to remember how to breathe.
The casserole dish is still on the porch railing. I should go back and put it somewhere more sensible. Eileen’s going to come out tomorrow and find it frozen solid. But there’s absolutely no way I’m walking back up there.
She was RIGHT THERE.
Ten years. Ten years of wondering what I’d do if I ever saw her again, what I’d say, how I’d act. I had vague fantasies about being cool and unbothered. Maybe delivering some devastating one-liner that would make her realize what she gave up.
Instead I nodded at her like she was a casual acquaintance and fled the scene.
Real impressive, Holt. Ten years of waiting and that’s what you came up with.
I force myself to put the truck in reverse. Tires crunching through snow as I back out of the driveway.
I don’t let myself look at the window again.
I can feel her watching. Or maybe I’m imagining it. Either way, I keep my eyes forward like a man who has his life together.
I do not have my life together.
The drive home takes twelve minutes. I spend the first five white-knuckling the steering wheel and the next seven having a very calm, very rational internal meltdown.
She’s back. She’s actually back.
After ten years of silence, ten years of wondering, ten years of planting flowers in her grandmother’s garden like some kind of lovesick idiot, she’s HERE. In Honeyridge. Staying at Eileen’s house like no time has passed at all.
And she looked—
God, she looked good. Different. Older, obviously, but in ways that made my chest tight. Softer somehow, despite the tension in her shoulders.
Still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.
Which is inconvenient as hell given the circumstances.
Also, I could smell her. Through the window. Through the snow. Through ten years of distance.
Honey and citrus, richer and more complex than I remember, and my whole body lit up like a Christmas tree the second it hit me. Every instinct I have started screaming omega, pack, MINE.
Which is insane.
She’s not mine. She stopped being mine a decade ago when she stopped answering my calls.
But my alpha instincts didn’t get that memo.
The farmhouse appears through the snow. I sit in the driveway for another minute, trying to get my face under control.
Lucas and Nate are going to take one look at me and know something’s wrong. I need to be calm. Casual. Totally fine.
I check my reflection in the rearview mirror.
I don’t look calm. I look like a man who just saw a ghost.
“Get it together, Holt,” I mutter, and head inside.
The kitchen smells like the pasta Lucas made for dinner. He stress-cooks, which means something already tipped him off that today was going to be a day.
Nate’s at the table with his reading glasses on, case file spread in front of him, pen tapping against the wood.
They both look up when I walk in.
I last about three seconds under their combined scrutiny.
“Cara’s back,” I say, because apparently my mouth has decided to skip the preamble.
The kitchen goes dead silent.
Lucas’s hand freezes on the spoon he was holding. Something flickers across his face, shock, then something raw he quickly tries to smooth over, before the spoon clatters against the pot.
Nate doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. But I watch the color drain from his face, watch his knuckles go white around the pen he’s holding.
For a long moment, nobody speaks.
“Back,” Nate finally says. His voice is flat. Careful. “As in—”
“In town. Staying at Eileen’s. I just saw her.” I move to the fridge because I need something to do with my hands. “I was dropping off the casserole dish and she was standing in the upstairs window.”
Lucas turns off the stove. His movements are too controlled. Too deliberate. “Did you talk to her?”
“No.” I grab a beer, crack it open, take a long pull. “I nodded at her and left.”
More silence.
“You nodded,” Lucas says slowly.
“Yep. Panicked. Nodded. Left.” I slump into a chair at the table.
Nobody says anything for a long moment. The weight of it settles over the kitchen like the snow outside.
Lucas abandons the stove entirely and sits down across from me. He’s trying to look calm, analytical. The doctor face he wears at work. But his jaw is tight and there’s a tension in his shoulders that wasn’t there a minute ago.
“She put her hand on the glass,” I say quietly. “When she saw me. She put her hand on the glass like—”
I stop. I don’t know how to finish that sentence.
“How are we doing with this?” Lucas asks. Not how are you doing. How are we. Because this isn’t just about me. “Actually?”
Nobody answers right away.
I look at Nate. He’s staring at the table, jaw tight, that unreadable expression locked down. But I’ve known him long enough to see underneath it. He’s not unreadable to me.
He’s devastated.
“Nate?”
He’s quiet for a long moment. Then: “Forty-seven times.”
The words land like stones.
“I called her forty-seven times before I stopped counting.” His voice is flat. Controlled. But there’s something underneath it, something old and sharp. “Wrote her a letter too. Actual pen and paper.”
His jaw works.
“She never responded. Not once.”
Lucas is quiet. Then: “I drove to her school. Spring break, freshman year. Six hours. Her roommate said she was gone for the week, didn’t know where.”
I didn’t know that. Neither of them ever told me.
“You never said anything.”
“What was there to say?” Lucas shrugs, but it’s too stiff to be casual. “I drove six hours looking for answers I never got. We’ve all got our stories.”
“The garden,” Nate says, looking at me.
“The garden,” I confirm quietly. “Ten years of her favorite flowers.”
We sit with that for a moment. Three alphas around a kitchen table. Three different ways of holding onto someone who left.
“She made her choice,” Nate says finally. His voice is hard. “Ten years ago. She chose her life, and it wasn’t us.”
“I know.”
“We built lives too. Good lives. We have the house, our jobs, the pack.” He gestures vaguely at the three of us. “We’re fine.”
“We are,” Lucas agrees. But he doesn’t sound convinced.
“So what do we do?” I ask.
Silence. Heavy.
“We keep our distance,” Nate says finally. “We don’t engage. If she tries to talk, we walk away.”
“That seems—”
“It’s the only way.” His voice is hard. “She had ten years to explain. Ten years to pick up a phone, write a letter, anything. She didn’t. Now she shows up and we’re supposed to just... let her back in?”
“I’m not saying let her back in—”
“Then what are you saying, Theo?” Nate’s eyes are sharp. “Because I know you. You’ll smile at her once and forget everything she did.”
That stings. Mostly because it’s probably true.
“We protect ourselves,” Lucas says quietly. “That’s the priority. We’ve built good lives here. We’re not going to let her blow that up just because she’s back.”
“And if she tries to talk to us?” I ask.
“We don’t let her.” Nate’s jaw is set. “We stay polite. We stay distant. And we don’t give her the chance to explain, because if we do—”
He stops. But I hear what he doesn’t say.
If we do, we might forgive her. And then she might leave again.
“Agreed?” Nate asks.
“Agreed,” Lucas says.
“Agreed,” I echo.
The word feels hollow in my mouth.
Because I already know it’s not going to work. We can make all the plans we want. We can agree to avoid her, to stay cold, to protect ourselves.
But this is Honeyridge Falls. You can’t avoid anyone in a town this small. We’re going to run into her at the grocery store, the Honey Crumb, the gas station. We’re going to smell her scent on the wind and feel our hearts do that stupid thing they’ve been doing for ten years.
And when she looks at us with those dark eyes, asking for a chance to explain—
I don’t know if any of us are strong enough to walk away.
Later, the kitchen is cleaned up and Lucas is making tea because he needs something to do with his hands that isn’t checking his phone.
“The whole town’s going to be talking about this by tomorrow,” he says. “Mrs. Peterson probably already knows.”
“Great.” I drain the last of my beer. “Can’t wait for everyone to ask how we’re handling things.”
“We’ll handle it,” Nate says. “We’re a pack. We’ve handled worse.”
But he doesn’t look at either of us when he says it. He’s staring out the window at the snow, and there’s something in his expression that makes my chest ache.
We’ve never talked about it. Not really. We made the decision years ago to stop waiting, stop hoping, stop letting her ghost rule our lives. We built this house. Built our careers. Built a life that didn’t include her.
But she’s always been here anyway. In the empty bedroom at the end of the hall. In the garden I plant every spring. In the way Nate still flinches sometimes when his phone rings.
“I’m going to bed,” Nate says abruptly. He pushes back from the table, takes his coffee cup to the sink. “Early shift tomorrow.”
He pauses at the doorway.
“For what it’s worth,” he says without turning around, “the nod was probably the right call. Anything else and you might have done something stupid.”
It’s the closest he’s going to get to saying I would have done something stupid too.
“Thanks, Nate.”
He nods once and disappears down the hall.
Lucas and I sit in silence for a while. The kettle boils. He pours two cups of tea neither of us really wants.
“He’s taking this hard,” Lucas says quietly.
“We all are.”
“Yeah.” He wraps his hands around his mug. “But Nate... he was the last one to stop calling. Did you know that?”