Chapter 16
WHAT WE CARRY, WHAT WE LEAVE
MICHAEL
Ifound Evan in the kitchen at the pack house, eating cereal like a man who'd given up on the concept of proper meals.
“Have you seen your dad?”
Evan looked up, spoon halfway to his mouth, milk dripping back into the bowl. Something flickered across his face.
“He's at Claire's tree,” he said. “He goes there sometimes. When things get heavy.”
“Claire's tree?”
“Mom's memorial.” Evan set down the spoon, pushed the bowl away.
“There's this massive oak about a mile into the forest, east of Moon Clearing. Dad planted wildflowers around it after she died. Spread her ashes there.” He paused.
“He doesn't talk about it much. But when he disappears for a few hours without telling anyone where he's going, that's usually where he ends up.”
Something tightened in my chest. Fifteen years of grief, and Daniel still had a place he went to sit with it. Still had a spot in the forest where he could be alone with everything he'd lost.
I understood that. More than I wanted to admit.
“Can you tell me how to get there?”
Evan studied me for a long moment. Those pale eyes, so much like his father's, weighing something I couldn't see.
“He might not want company,” he said finally. “That place is... it's sacred to him. Private.”
“I know. But I think—” I stopped. Started again. “I think maybe he's been private long enough.”
Evan's mouth twitched. Almost a smile.
“East trail from Moon Clearing. Follow the creek until you hit a boulder that looks like a sleeping bear. Turn left, walk another quarter mile. You'll know it when you see it.”
“Thank you.”
“Michael.” Evan's voice caught me at the door. “He's been carrying this alone for a long time. If you're going to be the one he finally shares it with... don't make him regret it.”
“I won't.”
I hoped that was a promise I could keep.
One moment I was hiking through dense forest, the next I stumbled into a clearing dominated by the largest oak I'd ever seen.
Its trunk had to be fifteen feet across, bark so deeply furrowed it looked like the skin of something ancient and patient.
Branches spread overhead like a cathedral ceiling, filtering afternoon sunlight into golden-green patterns that danced across the ground.
And beneath those branches, surrounded by wildflowers that shouldn't have been blooming this late in the season, Daniel sat with his back against the trunk.
He looked smaller somehow. Not physically.
Daniel could never look small, built like he was carved from the same granite as the mountains.
But something about the way he held himself, shoulders curved inward, head bowed, made him seem less like an Alpha and more like a man who'd been carrying too much for too long.
He didn't look up when I approached. Just said, “Evan told you where to find me.”
“He worries too much. Always has. Gets it from his mother.”
Daniel said it like it was a fact he’d lived with forever—fond, almost tired. Like Evan’s anxiety wasn’t a surprise to him, just another weather pattern in the pack. Another thing you learned to work around.
I followed his gaze and stopped at the edge of the wildflowers.
They shouldn’t have been there. Not like that. Late autumn didn’t grow color this loud, not in Hollow Pines. Purple and gold and deep crimson, crowded together in spirals that looked… deliberate. Not planted, exactly. Tended. Like the land remembered where hands had once been.
My throat tightened before I could stop it.
“This is where you scattered her ashes,” I said.
Not a question. Not because I knew for sure—because my body knew. The way it knew the smell of smoke in a house that used to be home.
Daniel’s exhale came slow. Controlled.
“This is where she asked to be,” he said. His voice didn’t break. It stayed steady, like he’d learned a long time ago how to speak around pain without letting it swallow him. “Claire wanted to stay in the territory. Said if she couldn’t stay with us, she wanted to at least stay close.”
The word close hit me like a bruise pressed too hard.
I didn’t sit at first. I just stood there, staring at the flowers like they might rearrange themselves into something that made sense. Like grief could be solved if you stared long enough.
Daniel lowered himself to the ground with a quiet grunt. He didn’t pat the earth beside him. Didn’t ask me to come closer. He just… made space without demanding I fill it.
So I sat. Not touching him, but near enough that I could feel the heat of him through our jackets, near enough that I could reach if I needed to.
I stared at the wildflowers until the burn behind my eyes got too sharp.
“Tell me about her,” I said, but the words came out rough—too quick, too eager, like if I didn’t ask now I’d lose my nerve.
Daniel didn’t answer immediately. He watched the clearing like he was seeing it through two timelines at once—the past layered over the present, the memory still sitting in the grass.
“She was… steady,” he said finally. Not poetic. Not romantic. Just honest. “Not in the quiet way. In the way that made you feel like the world couldn’t knock you over as long as she had a hand on your shoulder.”
I swallowed hard. That image—simple, grounding—did something ugly to my chest.
“She laughed at me,” Daniel added, and there was the smallest shift in his tone. Not softness. Not weakness. Just… a warmth he didn’t often allow himself. “A lot. I used to take myself too seriously. Still do, probably.”
“You?” I managed, and it came out almost sarcastic. “No.”
He huffed a breath that might’ve been a laugh if he let it become one. “Yeah. Me.”
He glanced at me then, quick, assessing—like he was checking if I was still with him, if he’d pushed too hard.
I was. Barely.
“How did you meet?” I asked, because if I stopped talking, if I let silence settle, I was going to think of Anna’s laugh. Anna’s hands. Anna in our kitchen. Anna being gone.
“Pack gathering,” Daniel said. “My father was already stepping back, and everyone kept looking at me like I was the next answer to every problem.” His jaw worked once, the muscle jumping.
“She walked right up to me like I wasn’t a title.
Like I was a person. Told me I looked like I needed someone to tell me a terrible joke. ”
I felt my mouth twitch despite myself. “Did she?”
“The worst knock-knock joke you’ve ever heard.” His eyes went distant for a second. “I groaned so hard I almost shifted on the spot.”
“And she laughed.”
Daniel’s gaze lowered to the flowers. “Yeah. She laughed.”
It wasn’t the kind of memory that cracked him open. It was the kind of memory he’d replayed enough times that it had edges. Shape. A place he could visit without bleeding out.
And that… was the difference between him and me, wasn’t it?
Because my grief was still a live wire.
I stared at the flowers again and felt my throat seize.
My throat tightened. My vision blurred.
Daniel noticed immediately.
He didn’t lean into me. Didn’t collapse. Didn’t make the moment about him.
He just shifted a little closer and offered his hand—palm up, steady, like an anchor.
No demand. No pressure.
Just here if you need it.
I stared at his hand for a second too long.
Then I took it.
His fingers closed around mine, warm and solid, and something inside me… didn’t stop hurting, but it stopped free-falling.
“I’m sorry,” I said, but it came out wrong. Too small for what it meant.
Daniel’s grip tightened once. “I know.”
The words shouldn’t have helped. But they did—because he didn’t say it’s okay. He didn’t pretend it was less than it was. He didn’t try to fix it.
He just acknowledged the grief like it was real.
Like it mattered.
I swallowed hard. “You talk about her like you’ve… made peace.”
Daniel’s mouth twitched, almost humorless. “I’ve had practice and besides I was also a mess then.”
“I can barely make it through breakfast without feeling like I’m stealing it.”
Daniel turned his head toward me slowly, expression steady but sharp with understanding. “You’re not stealing anything.”
“It feels like it.”
“I know.” He said it simply. Like he’d lived it. Like he’d watched men in his pack try to outrun grief and fail. Like he’d failed himself. “That’s the mind’s favorite trick after loss. It convinces you that surviving is a betrayal.”
I swallowed, throat raw. “And you’re saying it isn’t.”
“I’m saying your wife loved you,” Daniel said. “And if she loved you the way you talk like she did, she didn’t want you to rot in a house full of ghosts.”
The words should’ve made me angry.
Instead they made something inside me crack.
A sound slipped out of me before I could stop it—half laugh, half sob—and I turned my face away fast, ashamed of the noise.
Daniel didn’t comment on it. Didn’t flinch.
He just held my hand tighter.
Strong. Steady.
Alpha.
“You’re trying,” he said quietly. “I can see it. Even when you think you’re failing.”
I blinked hard, stared at the flowers because if I looked at him too directly, I was going to lose whatever control I still had left.
“I don’t know how to make room,” I admitted. “Everyone keeps saying it like it’s… a simple thing. Like you just move a chair and suddenly there’s space.”
Daniel’s voice went softer, but it didn’t break. “It isn’t simple. It’s slow. It’s ugly. Sometimes you take one step forward and six back.” His thumb brushed over my knuckles once, grounding. “But you don’t do it alone.”
I finally looked at him.
And for the first time, I saw it—not just grief in him, but the way he’d learned to hold it without letting it drown him. The way strength wasn’t the absence of pain, but the decision to carry it anyway.
“How did you keep leading after she died?”
“I didn’t have a choice,” he said. “The pack needed an Alpha. Evan needed a father. The territory needed someone to stand between it and everything that wanted to tear it apart.” His jaw clenched once. “So I stood.”
“And it didn’t destroy you?”