[Nell’s POV]
The step is cold under my legs and Rhys's footsteps are still dissolving into the dark and my hands won't stop shaking. The first real choice I've ever made. The words press outward against my ribs with every breath.
My feet move before my brain signs off on the destination—across the yard, past the fire pit, toward the only door that has ever made the noise in my head go quiet. Oren's steady hands and low voice and the gravity that doesn't ask anything except that I show up.
Halfway across the compound, a voice lands behind me like a hand catching my collar. "Where are you going?"
I turn. Sable is standing on the path from her cabin, arms crossed, bare feet on the dirt, and her face is doing something I've never seen—nothing at all. No warmth, no sarcasm, no conspiratorial grin.
Her eyes track the line between me and Oren's door like she's reading a map she already memorized. The expression has already done the maths I've spent months trying to hide.
She doesn't ask again. The silence between us fills with every conversation I steered sideways, every subject I changed, every porch I left before the air got warm enough to be honest in.
"I need to ask you something." Her voice is flat and careful in a way that Sable's voice has never once been in two years. "And I need you not to lie to me."
"Okay." My hands find each other behind my back and twist hard enough to leave marks I'll find tomorrow.
"How long?" She holds my gaze without blinking. "Not how long have you been sleeping with him. How long have you been in love with him?"
The question crashes through every floor I've been standing on. My mouth opens and nothing useful arrives—she's asked the one thing I haven't had the courage to ask myself.
"Sable, it was once." My voice cracks on the second word. "It didn't mean—we didn't plan—"
"Stop." One hand up, palm flat, and the gesture cuts me at the knees. "I don't want to hear about sacrifice. I don't want to hear about protection, or how you were sparing my feelings, or whatever version of this you've been rehearsing in the shower."
"It's not a version." My fingernails dig half-moons into my own wrists. "I was trying to keep you from getting hurt."
"From getting hurt?" Her chin juts forward and her voice climbs half an octave. "Or from making my own decisions about my own life? That's not protection, Nell. That's management."
"That's not what I—" I start, but she shakes her head once, hard, and her arms cross tighter—collarbones and elbows forming a wall I can't reach through.
"It is exactly what you did. You decided what I could handle. You decided I needed a softer version of reality—like I'm something fragile you have to carry instead of a grown woman who can hear the truth."
My teeth find the inside of my cheek and press until copper blooms across my tongue. She's not wrong about a single word and that's the part that makes my chest cave inward.
"Here's what hurts." Her voice drops into something steady and measured and completely unlike her. "It's not Oren. Somewhere under the cakes and the knitting and the speeches I gave about his smile—I always knew."
"His eyes didn't follow me." She swallows once. "They followed you. I'm loud, Nell, not blind."
"Sable—" I reach for her arm and she steps back, the distance between my fingers and her sleeve more final than any door I've ever watched close.
"What hurts is the lying." She steps closer and her bare feet make no sound on the dirt. "That my best friend—the person I ran into the dark for—looked me in the face every single day and performed a version of our friendship designed to keep me comfortable."
"You smiled while I talked about knitting him things." Her voice is glass—clear, hard, holding together by sheer tension. "You let me bake three practice cakes for his birthday. You sat there and watched me hope."
"I didn't know how to tell you." My voice splinters down the middle. "Every time I opened my mouth to start that conversation, I saw your face and I couldn't finish it."
"Couldn't treat me like an equal, you mean." She doesn't blink. "You did the same thing you did with Callum. Swallowed yourself whole to manage someone else's feelings. Built a little box for me to live in where everything was fine and Oren was just a friend and Nell had no secrets."
The word Callum in her mouth opens something in my chest I don't know how to close. My vision blurs and the tears come—hot, useless, wrecking my face while the person I love most tells me exactly what I've done.
"I am not Callum." Each word lands with space between for the damage to register. "And I deserved better than being managed."
"I know." The words come out wrecked, barely holding shape. "Sable, I know you did. I just—I couldn't figure out how to tell you the truth without losing you."
"Your intentions were perfect. They always are." She uncrosses her arms and her hands hang open and empty at her sides. "You meant well while you lied to the only person who never asked you to be anything but honest."
She exhales through her nose—one sharp breath that carries the weight of a year's worth of unasked questions. "You were so busy protecting me that you forgot I never needed a shield. I needed my friend."
A sound leaves my throat that I don't authorize—raw, ugly. My palm presses over my mouth but it's too late, and Sable watches me cry the way you watch weather—present, unmoved.
"I need time." Her voice drops to a quiet that sounds wrong from her. "I still love you. That hasn't gone anywhere, and I'm furious about that too, so don't test me. But I can't look at you right now."
She turns. Bare feet on dirt, arms wrapped around herself, walking toward her cabin without looking back. I watch every step.
I don't go to Oren's.
The cabin is dark and the boys are asleep—Rowan on his back with arms flung wide, Ash curled tight with his thumb near his mouth. I lower myself to the floor between their cots, spine against the wall, knees drawn to my chest, and every wall I built to protect Sable collapsed on top of me instead.
Through the window the guest quarters glow with a single warm light. Rhys is still awake—still packing, probably, folding shirts with the same deliberate hands that carved a wolf he didn't mean to carve.
Three people I've hurt by trying to protect them and the math keeps coming out the same no matter how I rearrange it. Rowan shifts and makes a small sound—not distress, just a body settling—and my hand finds his cot rail in the dark.
I'm not sure I've made a real choice yet. But through the glass, Rhys's light flickers once and holds steady, like a question I'm running out of time to answer.