Chapter 11 #2
The choice felt larger than it should. Larger than a yes or no about work.
It felt like choosing whether the Duchess Suite became the center of my story or remained a footnote I could live with.
Whether three days in a hotel room rewrote two years of a life I'd built deliberately, brick by brick, or whether that life was strong enough to absorb the hit and keep going.
I didn't know the answer. What I knew, flat and feelingless, was that I would have to decide sooner than I wanted, with more clarity than I could find while staring at the screen.
I left the email open. I would answer it. I just hadn't decided how.
I read the request twice more before I allowed myself to feel anything about it.
That was the rule I'd made, somewhere between the hotel and home: feel second, think first. So I thought.
I opened a browser tab and typed Stillwater Retreats into the search bar, and what came back was not what I'd expected.
Their website was clean. Functional. A little underwhelming for a hospitality group that specialized in scent-safe lodging.
An operation like that should have led with warmth and landed on a serif font that didn't look like it came with the template.
But the properties themselves were something else entirely.
Four locations, each with its own identity.
Seaside cabins on a stretch of coastline I recognized from Celia's engagement photos, white clapboard against blue water, a lighthouse in the background throwing long shadows at golden hour.
A farmhouse property surrounded by scattered tiny houses, each one its own nest, the main building done in weathered gray with deep porches and string lights.
A log-cabin guest house north of the city, wooded and private, with smaller cabins arranged around a heated pool and a fire pit large enough for a pack to gather.
And a coming-soon page for something modern and wooded, all glass and cedar, still under construction.
All four sat within an hour of Bridgeport.
Close enough to be convenient. Close enough that I made myself stop noticing.
I clicked through the galleries. The interiors were better than the branding suggested: soft linens, thoughtful lighting, rooms designed to feel inhabited rather than staged.
Someone had nudged a lamp toward the best reading angle, settled a throw within easy reach, and considered where each small comfort would matter.
I knew enough about Isak now to recognize the mind behind those choices.
Nothing announced itself as design, but every apparently instinctive placement revealed the care underneath.
I'd only known what Celia mentioned while planning the wedding.
That her brother ran a hospitality group.
That she'd considered it for the venue and decided against it on scale grounds.
That I'd backed her on the call, professionally, because the guest list had started small and grown past anything Stillwater's intimate sites could hold.
Two hundred people and a pair of uncles who thought scent blockers were a government program did not belong in a boutique property built for intimacy.
I hadn't looked into it further. I hadn't needed to.
Denil's work was Denil's work, and I had a wedding to design, a heat to postpone, and a best friend to stand beside.
The date on my phone said August thirteenth.
Celia's honeymoon would be over. She'd be home, unpacked, settled into whatever married life looked like for the five of them: Celia and the four she'd married, all of them under a last name she hadn't carried a month ago.
I should call her. I would call her. I had been meaning to call her for two weeks and had found fourteen reasons not to, each one more convincing than the last. The fifteenth reason was currently open in my inbox under the subject line
Branding Inquiry: Stillwater Retreats
I set the phone down. Later. I would deal with Celia later, once I'd decided what to do about the email. Then I could tell her I'd handled it like an adult and leave out the three days I'd spent begging to be bitten before fleeing at dawn.
The door chimed at twelve-fifteen. Sable came through it with the easy confidence of someone who treated the threshold between businesses as a formality, two paper cups balanced in one hand and a brown paper bag in the other.
Her canvas apron was permanently stained green at the knees, her bleached-white hair and brown roots pulled back in a high, messy knot that caught the light from the windows.
"Lunch," she announced, like the word itself was a gift. "You're rearranging the display again, which means you're thinking too hard about something, and thinking too hard requires calories. I brought salad. The good kind, with the candied pecans you pretend not to like."
"I don't pretend not to like them. I openly dislike them. They're too sweet."
"You eat them every time." She set the cups on the counter, pushed one toward me. "Large, unsweetened, double ice, oat milk. Don't look surprised. I've been bringing you coffee for a year."
The coffee was perfect. I took a sip and didn't thank her because thanking Sable for basic competence was its own form of insult.
She had already unpacked the salads onto the counter between us, pushing napkins across the wood like she owned the surface, which in the economy of our block, she sort of did.
We ate. She talked about a wedding order that had come in late, a September bride who wanted dahlias and peonies in the same arrangement, which Sable had gently explained was like asking for snow and sunshine on the same day.
I listened, contributed the minimum required to demonstrate I was present, and somewhere between the second forkful and the third, Sable set her plastic container down and looked at me.
"What's eating you?"
The question arrived with the directness that made Sable Sable.
No lead-in, no softening, just the thing she wanted to know placed on the table between us like another napkin.
I could have deflected. I had deflected better questions from people I cared about more.
But the green-stained apron mattered. So did the candied pecans I was absolutely going to eat, and Sable had known me long enough to clock the difference between a bad day and a wound.
Deflection felt like more work than honesty.
"Heat at the wedding," I said, keeping my eyes on the salad. "Bad timing. Worse location. I used the app."
Sable nodded once. She didn't flinch, didn't widen her eyes, didn't turn concern into something medical.
As a fellow omega, she was used to this sort of problem, or so she thought.
This was a problem I didn't think anyone had ever faced.
She just listened, chewing a forkful of arugula with the patience of a woman who had heard harder stories than this.
"Pack showed up. Three of them. I knew one of them, Celia's brother. The other two were his packmates. We spent three days in a suite. It was... thorough."
"Good thorough or bad thorough?"
"Both. Competent. Careful. They had a system.
" I set my fork down. "They have a duffel.
With supplies. And a notebook. With observations about other omegas.
Preferences. Things that worked, things that didn't. I found it after the heat broke.
Clear-headed. Packed my things. Left while they were asleep. "
Sable's expression didn't change, but her posture did.
Her shoulders squared toward me, and her fork came to rest against the edge of the container.
"And now they contacted you? Stalking you?
They want something?" She guessed, but more than guessed.
She had her own history with a pack that I had no business divulging.
"Now they've emailed my business inbox with a commission.
Branding materials for their properties.
Scent-safe lodging, omega recovery, the whole collection.
Real work. Good money. Exposure to the exact niche I've been trying to land.
" I picked up my coffee. "It's a legitimate ask. And it's from the same men."
"The same men who had a notebook full of other women's preferences."
"And men, but yes."
"The same men you left without saying goodbye."
"Yes."
Sable took a long drink of her coffee. Her eyes stayed on mine over the lid of the cup, steady and unjudging. When she set it down, she said, "So the question is whether you take good work from people who hurt your ego, or whether you let the hurt decide what work you're allowed to do."
She'd put it more cleanly than I had managed after an hour of circling the email, with every argument changing under a different light.
Sable reduced complicated things to their elements; it was why her little business had doubled in two years despite the abundance of flower shops in the East Village.
"I didn't say they hurt me."
"You didn't have to." She speared a candied pecan off my salad without asking.
"You've been rearranging that display for a week, sweetheart.
You only rearrange when something's eating at you that won't stay down.
And whatever happened in that hotel, it's still sitting in your chest, and now it's asking you to design its public image. "
I ate the last candied pecan before she could take it. "It's more complicated than that."
"It's always more complicated than that.
Complication is what feelings are for. Decisions are simpler.
" She gathered her empty container, crumpled the napkin, dropped both in the paper bag.
"The work is good. The money is good. The exposure is exactly what you've been angling for.
If you say no because of what happened in that hotel, you're letting the hotel control professional choices you built this entire shop to own.
That's the read. You can disagree with it. "