Danae’s POV
The public bus lurched over a pothole, and I nearly dropped my phone.
On the screen: rejection number nine, politely worded, received that morning from a marketing firm I’d spent three days tailoring my application for.
Two days since the Horizon Media Group interview.
Two days of silence, which I was doing an extremely poor job of not interpreting.
I scrolled past the rejection and opened the job listings again.
Cleaning services?
Retail?
I had a college degree, four years of teaching experience, half-completed wedding planning that had turned out to be practice for a wedding that never happened, and apparently none of it was marketable in any way that mattered.
The irony was exact and merciless: I had walked away from my teaching position to support Galen’s career, to have time for his Pack obligations, to be the kind of partner his ambitions required.
And now here I was—savings nearly gone, career hollowed out, competing with twenty-two-year-olds for entry-level office work.
My father’s medical bills ran a quiet ticker-tape through the back of my mind at all hours.
The treatments weren’t negotiable.
Neither was the timeline.
Lost in the calculations, I missed my stop.
By the time I registered it, the bus was pulling away from downtown toward Oak Park.
I sighed and got off at the next stop, deciding against the wait and the return journey.
Oak Park in the early evening had the particular grace of a place that doesn’t know it’s beautiful.
Families spread on checkered blankets.
Couples walking the perimeter of the small lake with their hands linked.
Children chasing each other around the play equipment with the specific, goalless energy of being seven years old.
I cut away from the main path, moving deeper into the park until I found a large oak standing apart from the others at the water’s edge.
I sat with my back against the bark and watched the sky change.
The lake surface moved from blue to copper to deep, bleeding red as the sun descended.
On the far bank, a young couple sat close together on a bench, the man’s arm around the woman’s shoulders, their heads bent together over something she was holding.
They looked unhurried.
Uncomplicated.
Like people who hadn’t yet accumulated anything to regret.
My phone vibrated.
Mom.
I silenced it.
My parents still didn’t know the real story.
All they had was the version where their daughter had cold feet—had thrown away five years and a wedding deposit and disappointed everyone.
I couldn’t tell them what I actually knew. New chapters come out on g.com first.
How do you explain werewolves to people who still argued about whether acupuncture was real?
I traced the dent on my left ring finger with my opposite thumb, the indent where Galen’s ring had sat for three years.
Caught myself doing it.
Pulled my hand away.
“I’m such an idiot,” I told the darkening sky, and the sky offered nothing useful in return.
The sun had nearly finished its descent, leaving the park in that suspended lavender-gray that happens between day and dark, when I decided to head back.
I brushed the grass from my jeans and stood—
And heard a voice I recognized.
Caspian Jorah.
I froze, then moved quietly back behind the oak’s wide trunk, pressing my shoulder against the bark.
My heart was doing something entirely stupid.
After our last encounter—after I’d told him, with careful enunciation, exactly where to go—the absolute last thing I needed was a second accidental meeting in as many days.
I peered around the trunk.
He was walking with a woman toward a bench perhaps thirty yards away.
She was tall, slender, with the kind of perfect blonde updo that suggested she’d arrived from somewhere important.
She moved with the ease of a woman accustomed to being looked at, and she was looking at him with the particular warm attention of someone who had hoped to be here.
I pressed my back against the bark and breathed carefully through my nose.
Whatever this was, I did not want to see it.