Chapter 13
Ididn’t move when Aunt Mabel said his name.
For a second—just a second—I thought I had misheard her. That the rush of blood in my ears had distorted the moment. But she hadn’t stuttered. She hadn’t hesitated.
“Cassian.”
She’d said it with recognition.
What the hell?
The air in the foyer felt different after that. Like something old and buried had just exhaled.
Cassian didn’t touch me. He didn’t step in front of me or subtly claim ground the way he sometimes did when he sensed tension. He simply stood at my shoulder, present but still, allowing the moment to belong to me.
That told me everything.
He already knew this wasn’t random.
Aunt Mabel stepped back from the door, her cardigan hanging loosely around her small frame, her silver hair pulled into the same low twist she’d worn since I was a child. “You’d better come in,” she said gently. “It’s cold.”
We stepped inside.
Her house smelled the way it always had—lavender sachets tucked into corners, lemon oil on wood, something warm and faintly sweet lingering from the oven.
The familiarity pressed against me in a way that felt almost disorienting.
I hadn’t been here in years, but nothing had changed.
The same pale yellow walls. The same oak sideboard near the dining room.
The same rug in the hallway with the faint threadbare patch near the stairs.
Stability.
Containment.
Cassian removed his coat without prompting, folding it neatly over his arm before draping it over the back of a chair. The movement was quiet, controlled. He did not introduce himself. He did not offer explanation.
He waited.
“Tea?” Aunt Mabel asked, as though we were here for nothing more dramatic than a Sunday visit.
“Yes,” I said automatically, my voice sounding steady even though my pulse had not quite recovered from the sound of his name on her lips.
Cassian inclined his head once. “Thank you.”
We followed her into the kitchen, and something about that simple act—walking into a room that had held so many versions of me over the years—made my chest tighten.
I had studied for exams at this table. I had cried here at sixteen when a boy from school had humiliated me in front of my friends. I had listened to my mother argue softly on the phone in the hallway while Aunt Mabel pretended not to hear.
This house had always been where things were said plainly.
If they were said at all.
Aunt Mabel set the kettle on the stove and turned toward us, her gaze moving from me to Cassian and back again. It wasn’t suspicion in her expression. It wasn’t approval either.
It was assessment.
“Sit,” she said.
We did.
Cassian chose the chair beside mine instead of across from me, his thigh brushing lightly against my own. The contact was firm enough to be felt, subtle enough not to dominate the space. It grounded me in a way that felt almost unfair. I wasn’t facing this alone.
But my thoughts were spiraling, anyway.
My aunt had said his name without hesitation.
And I couldn’t begin to imagine how that recognition existed.
Cassian’s world—built on distance and precision—did not overlap with this kitchen.
With Saratoga seasons and lavender wreaths and chipped tile floors.
There was no logical bridge between them.
And yet one had just materialized.
I was already unsteady from the last few days.
From the isolation of his house. From the way he had stripped me down—physically, yes, but more than that—emotionally, psychologically.
I was still adjusting to the woman who had pressed her palms against stone and begged without flinching.
Still adjusting to the realization that I had wanted to be denied. Wanted to be claimed.
Now that same woman was sitting at her aunt’s table while generational ghosts started whispering.
The disorientation stacked.
Part of me—the practical, disciplined part—offered an immediate solution: leave.
Get through this conversation. Smile. Go back to the airport.
Take the next flight to Charleston and fold this entire experience into something contained and survivable.
I could treat it like a recalibration. A private awakening. A lesson in what intensity felt like.
I could return home sharper. More strategic. Choose men with edges but safeguards. Men who commanded rooms but didn’t threaten to rearrange my internal landscape. Men who knew how to take control in curated doses.
I could tell myself that was growth.
That I’d learned what I respond to.
That I could now apply it intelligently.
But the thought rang hollow almost as soon as it formed. Because what had happened in the woods hadn’t felt like experimentation. It had felt like recognition. And retreat wouldn’t make me unchanged again. It would only mean I’d chosen containment over truth.
“I don’t know him,” Aunt Mabel said after a moment, answering the question I hadn’t quite formed. “Not personally.”
My shoulders loosened by a fraction. Thank God.
“But I know what he is.”
The kettle began to hum softly on the stove.
I forced myself to meet her eyes. “What does that mean?”
She considered me carefully, as though deciding how much truth I could tolerate in one sitting.
“You look just like her,” she said.
The shift in subject felt like stepping off solid ground.
“Like who?”
“Your mother.”
The words landed without drama, without flourish. They didn’t need either.
“In what way?” I asked, hearing the faint thread of defensiveness I hadn’t intended to reveal.
“Not in your face,” she said gently. “In the way you hold yourself when you’ve already decided something, but you’re still waiting to see whether the world will object.”
Heat crept up my neck.
Cassian said nothing.
The kettle whistled sharply. Aunt Mabel turned it off and poured water into three mugs, the ordinary rhythm of the motion somehow amplifying the weight of what was happening.
“There was a winter,” she began once she’d settled across from us. “Long before you were born. Before your mother had settled into the life everyone now thinks she’s always had.”
I wrapped my fingers around the mug without drinking.
“She met a man,” Aunt Mabel continued. “He wasn’t suitable. Not in the way that mattered to the people she moved among.”
“Suitable,” I repeated.
“He didn’t ask permission to exist,” she said quietly. “He didn’t adjust himself to make others comfortable. He had his own code. His own world. And he did not bend it.”
The image formed unbidden in my mind. Broad shoulders. Unapologetic presence. A man who did not ask.
Cassian remained still beside me.
“She was going to leave with him,” Aunt Mabel said.
My breath caught.
“She packed a bag. Told no one but me. She had it in her head that she could step out of the life she’d built and into something … less contained.”
Less contained.
That was one way to describe it.
“She didn’t,” I said.
It wasn’t a question.
“No,” Aunt Mabel agreed. “She didn’t.”
“Why?”
The answer did not come immediately.
“She realized that what she wanted didn’t align with the version of herself she had worked so hard to become,” Aunt Mabel said finally. “And instead of letting the version change, she let the man go.”
The simplicity of it was devastating.
Not scandal.
Not betrayal.
Fear.
Not of him.
Of herself.
“She chose stability,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And she married my father.”
“Yes.”
“And she’s been … happy.”
Aunt Mabel’s gaze softened.
“She’s been consistent,” she said. “And she’s been respected. And she’s been admired for her discipline.”
Not the same thing.
I stared into my tea, watching the surface ripple slightly with the tremor in my hand.
“She called me,” Aunt Mabel continued, “because she recognizes something.”
“In me?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“The same hunger she buried.”
The word made my throat tighten.
Hunger.
It was too raw. Too accurate.
“That’s why she’s asking about him?” I asked, nodding faintly toward Cassian.
“She doesn’t know him,” Aunt Mabel said. “But she knows the type. She hears it in your voice. Sees it in the way you’re moving through the world right now.”
My mother heard it in my voice?
“She’s not angry,” Aunt Mabel added. “She’s unsettled.”
That felt worse.
Unsettled implied recognition.
Unsettled implied memory.
“I didn’t tell her anything,” I said quietly.
“I know,” Aunt Mabel replied. “But mothers don’t always need details to understand patterns.”
Silence settled over the table again, thick but not hostile.
I became acutely aware of Cassian’s presence beside me—the steady heat of him, the quiet gravity he carried even in someone else’s kitchen. He did not interrupt. He did not insert himself into the narrative.
He allowed it to be mine.
“You knew,” I said to him without looking up.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“A woman like your mother doesn’t close a chapter like that without leaving traces,” he replied evenly. “In herself. In the people around her.”
“You didn’t think I deserved to know?”
“I thought it wasn’t my story to tell.”
The echo of Aunt Mabel’s earlier words irritated me more than it should have.
“Everything else you control,” I said, keeping my voice low. “You decide the pace. You decide how far we go. But not this?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because this choice is yours,” he said quietly. “Not mine.”
The answer did not come with heat. It came with clarity.
And that was harder to argue with.
Aunt Mabel reached across the table and rested her hand over mine. Her skin was warm and familiar.
“You don’t have to become her,” she said gently. “But you also don’t have to reject her to prove you’re different.”
The balance in that statement lodged itself somewhere deep.
I wasn’t here to rebel. I wasn’t here to perform some dramatic generational correction. I was here because I had asked for something. And because I had been answered.
“I should call her,” I said after a long moment.
“Yes,” Aunt Mabel said. “You should.”