8. Shepherd #2
“True.” I set my book aside, giving her my full attention. “How are you really doing, Noa? Not the version you show us. The real answer.”
She was quiet for a long time. Long enough that I thought she wasn't going to respond at all.
“I don't know,” she said finally. “I keep waiting for it to make sense.
For some part of this to feel manageable.
But every time I think I've got a handle on it, something else happens.
The storm stops but the roads are buried.
The roads start to clear but then ice comes.
It's like the universe is specifically designing obstacles to keep me here.”
“The universe isn't that organized.”
“I know. But it feels that way.” She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them.
A protective posture. Defensive. “I'm not good at this.
Depending on people. Being stuck somewhere I can't control.
My whole life I've been the one who handles things.
The one who doesn't need help. And now...”
“Now you need help and you don't know how to ask for it.”
“Now I need help and I hate that I need it.” She met my eyes, and there was something raw in her expression.
Something honest. “I keep waiting for the catch.
For the moment when one of you decides that helping me has a price.
That's how it's always worked before. People don't just... help. Not without expecting something in return.”
The admission hit harder than I expected. Not because it was surprising, but because it was so familiar. I knew that feeling. The certainty that kindness was just manipulation with a softer face. The inability to accept help without waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“Who taught you that?” I asked quietly.
She was sitting close enough that I could have reached out and touched her. Close enough that I could see the faint freckles across the bridge of her nose, the way her pulse beat in the hollow of her throat.
She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and I found myself following the movement, tracing the curve of her ear, the line of her jaw.
I wanted to touch her. The realization settled into me quietly, without fanfare. Not just because she was an omega and I was an alpha. Because she was her. This fierce, wounded, impossibly stubborn woman who was letting me see behind her walls for the first time.
I kept my hands where they were. But the wanting didn't go away.
“Everyone.” She laughed, but there was no humor in it.
“My family, mostly. They were never cruel, exactly. Just... conditional. Everything was conditional. Their approval, their support, their love. It all came with strings attached, and I spent my whole childhood trying to figure out what the strings were before they could tangle me up.”
“Is that why you left?”
“That's why I do everything.” She looked away, toward the window and the frozen world beyond.
“Run away to the mountains. Take the most isolated job I could find. Push everyone away before they can get close enough to disappoint me.” A pause.
“I know it's not healthy. I know I can't live my whole life like this.
But it's the only way I know how to survive.”
I understood. More than she probably realized.
“I used to think observation was enough,” I said slowly. “That if I watched people carefully enough, understood them deeply enough, I could connect without risking anything. I could analyze their patterns, predict their behaviors, and never be surprised. Never be hurt.”
She looked at me, curious despite herself. “And?”
“And I was wrong.” I thought about Maya.
About all the things I'd seen and catalogued and completely failed to understand.
“Watching isn't the same as connecting. You can know everything about someone and still miss the most important things.
The things that matter aren't in the patterns. They're in the spaces between.”
“That's very philosophical.”
“I was a philosophy professor, remember. It comes with the territory.”
She almost smiled at that. Almost. “So what changed? What made you realize you were wrong?”
I hesitated. This was the part of the story I didn't tell people. The part I'd buried so deep that even Calder and Bo only knew the broad strokes.
But she'd given me honesty. It seemed only fair to give her some in return.
“I had a graduate student,” I said. “Maya.
She was brilliant. One of the most promising minds I'd ever encountered. I spent three years as her advisor, watching her work, guiding her research, helping her develop her ideas. I knew everything about her intellectual development. Her arguments, her insights, her growing confidence.”
I paused, trying to find the words.
“I knew everything about her mind,” I continued. “But I never asked about anything else. Never noticed that she was struggling. Never saw the signs that she was barely holding on. I was so focused on what I could observe that I missed what she was hiding.”
Noa was quiet, waiting.
“She died,” I said. “Three months after she defended her dissertation. And I didn't know she was in trouble until it was too late to help.”
The words hung in the air between us. I hadn't said them out loud in years. Hadn't let myself think about them directly. They'd been locked away in a box in my mind, too painful to examine, too heavy to carry openly.
“I'm sorry,” Noa said. Softly, genuinely. “That must have been devastating.”
“It was. It still is, most days.” I met her eyes. “That's why I came here. Not just to get away from people, but to get away from myself. From the person who'd been so certain he understood human nature and turned out to be completely blind.”
“And did it work? Getting away?”
“For a while. It was easier to be alone than to risk failing someone else.” I thought about Calder, about Bo, about the strange family we'd built without meaning to.
“But then Calder took me in, and Bo accepted me, and I realized that isolation wasn't actually protecting anyone. It was just another form of running away.”
She was quiet for a long moment, processing. I could almost see her fitting my story alongside her own, finding the places where they overlapped.
“So what do you do now?” she asked. “How do you... connect without watching? Without analyzing?”
“I'm still figuring that out.” I smiled, rueful. “But I think it starts with being present. Actually present, not just observing from a safe distance. Letting yourself be seen as much as you're seeing.”
“That sounds terrifying.”
“It is. But the alternative is worse.”
The fire crackled between us. Outside, another tree branch crashed to the ground, the sound muffled by the walls but still present. A reminder that the world was still frozen, still treacherous, still trapping us here together.
“I don't know how to do that,” she said quietly. “Be present. Let people in. I've spent so long keeping everyone out that I don't know if I remember how.”
“You're doing it right now.”
She blinked. “What?”
“This conversation. You've been honest with me.
You've let me see the real you, not just the version you show the world.” I leaned forward slightly, close enough now that I could smell her clearly, that rain-and-honeysuckle scent that had been driving me slowly crazy for days.
“That's what being present looks like. You're already doing it. You just don't realize it yet.”
She stared at me for a long moment, and I watched something shift in her expression.
Her eyes dropped to my mouth, just for a second, so quick I might have imagined it.
But I didn't imagine the way her breath caught, or the flush that crept up her neck.
She felt it too. Whatever this was between us, she felt it.
“You're very annoying,” she said finally. Her voice was rougher than it had been. “Anyone ever tell you that?”
“Frequently.”
“Good. Just making sure you know.”
But there was no heat in the words. And when she turned back to the fire, she was sitting closer than she had been before. Her knee almost touching mine. Not quite contact, but close. Close enough to be deliberate.
I didn't move away. Neither did she. Something had shifted between us. Something that felt a lot like the beginning of something else.
The ice kept falling outside. The cabin kept shrinking around us. But something had shifted in the space between us, and I thought maybe, possibly, we'd both taken a small step toward something better.
It wasn't much. But it was a start.