Epilogue Left Behind #2
The word snags on something cold in me. She's been quietly building an exit the whole time I've been busy burning my own house to the studs.
I frown into the dark.
"Wait. What?"
"That's the reaction I was hoping for." I can hear her settling in, getting comfortable, the phone shifting against her ear.
"It got announced today, right in the middle of your whole circus.
Apparently the whole slate for the next couple months is nothing but high-end celebrity clientele.
Overseas. Nobody knows a single name, obviously, because those people guard their NDAs like state secrets, but the gist of it is she won't need to be anywhere near Honeybell Harbor to run it.
Some folks are even saying she's stepping back completely. Taking a break."
A beat.
"I only called because, y'know. She's your Omega. Figured you'd want the heads-up before the rest of the town."
The word lands wrong, and I flinch off it.
"She's not."
"She's not what?"
"My Omega." The correction scrapes coming out.
"She's not. There was…it turns out there was a clause.
Some legal thing. I found out this morning, standing in the government office like an idiot, that I was never actually registered into the pack at all.
Been that way ten weeks. Nobody told me.
I didn't even get a letter." I drag a hand down my face.
"Best I can figure, it locked in before the night I crashed on your couch. So."
There's a little silence.
"They're seriously still holding the couch thing against you?" Iris sounds almost offended on my behalf, which is more loyalty than I've gotten from anyone all day.
"No shit they are."
"Well." She draws it out, and I can hear the shrug in it. "I mean. Yeah. Okay, if I'm being real with you, I probably would've been pretty ticked too, if my man went and slept over at some other girl's place just 'cause he was tired. That's a look, Cade. Even if nothing happened."
"Iris." I pinch the bridge of my nose. "You are not making me feel any better right now."
"Right. Sorry." She doesn't sound sorry. She sounds like she's enjoying herself.
In fairness, I can't blame her the enjoyment.
I've been a cold, careless kind of friend to Iris over the years — showed up when I was lonely, vanished when I wasn't, crashed on her couch and let her take the blame for a scandal she had nothing to do with.
She owes me exactly none of the softness she's spending on me right now. That she's on the phone at all, feeding a disgraced man his own bad news gently, is more grace than I've earned from a single soul in this town tonight.
"Okay, okay. So then you definitely don't know about the other two."
My stomach does a slow, cold turn.
"What about them?"
"August. The flower guy." Papers rustle on her end, like she's reading off something.
"His shop, Bellamy Blooms, the pretty one on Main, got bought out.
Today. Some big corporate money guy swooped in and put down top dollar, like an absolutely obscene number.
Word is he caught some wedding infomercial that ran this afternoon and just had to have it.
They're gonna gut the place, upgrade it, bring in a whole new CEO.
" She whistles low. "Nobody has the first clue what August's gonna do next, but a payout like that?
That's set-your-grandkids'-grandkids-up money. That's never-work-again money."
I sit there with my mouth open.
August loves that shop. That shop is August, every inch of it, the soil under his nails and the light through the front glass. He'd sooner sell a kidney.
Unless he was already leaving.
The math starts assembling itself in my head, cold and clean, the way a bad diagnosis does.
A business sold. Another business sold. A ranch handed off to a hand who'll keep it warm.
A cottage — I glance up at the black windows again, and my stomach lurches.
You don't liquidate a whole life in a single afternoon by accident.
You don't stumble into a clean, total exit like this one. Somebody planned it. Somebody very good at planning laid out every piece of it down to the hour, and I have a sick, certain feeling I know exactly which slow-talking wedding planner in a white suit that somebody turned out to be.
"What about Beckett?" I hear myself ask, and my voice has gone thin.
"Same deal, basically." Iris pops her gum.
"Not sure if it's the exact same money guy or if there's a whole pack of rich vultures circling to buy up Honeybell Harbor one cute little business at a time, but Beckett took a buyout too.
And get this, I heard he sold his ranch.
The whole spread. Sold it clean to one of the old veteran hands who've worked it for him for years, told the guy he wouldn't be around to keep it running for the foreseeable, so it was his now.
" A pause. "Which, like. Who does that? Who sells a family ranch on a Tuesday? "
My heart skips, and then it drops, because I already know the answer to that.
A man does that when he's not planning on being anywhere near it.
I open the truck door.
I don't fully decide to.
My body just does it, moving on the same dumb animal instinct that carried me down that aisle this afternoon, and I step out onto the gravel and start walking toward the dark cottage with the phone pressed hard to my ear.
"Iris." My voice has changed and she hears it. "What are you saying? The way you're laying all this out — it makes it sound like they're about to vanish."
"I mean." For the first time, she hesitates, and the gossip drains a little out of her tone.
"Okay, look, that's actually kind of why I called you specifically.
People are starting to say it out loud. That Amber's leaving.
Moving away from Honeybell Harbor for good, taking her whole pack with her.
But I told them there's no way, because I haven't seen a single moving truck, not one, and this town can't sneeze without four people knowing.
So I figured I'd go straight to the source.
" A breath. "But then you're telling me you're not even legally in the pack anymore, so...
I mean, Cade. If that's true. They wouldn't exactly be obligated to tell you they were going, would they? "
I reach the porch.
My boots are loud on the wooden steps in the enormous quiet, the marsh hushing behind the house, the stars cold overhead. I put my hand on the door.
I try the knob. Locked. Solid. It doesn't give a millimeter.
When I turn my head, I finally see it — staked into the flower bed she used to keep so carefully, right there beside the porch, catching a thin blade of starlight.
A sign.
SOLD.
For a long moment I just look at it.
The paint's fresh. The little metal stake is driven in clean and straight, professional, recent — this sign went up today, maybe this very afternoon, maybe in the exact hour I stood in a tent watching her marry three other men and thought, God help me, that I still had a door left to knock on.