Chapter 29 *

Chapter 29 *
Emery’s POV
"I know it's done." My chest was getting tight. "I know that. But I walked out of that house like — I just left. One bag and a box and a cab, and I didn't say goodbye to anyone who actually deserved one. I need to do this. I can't just—" I pressed my fingers to my sternum. "I can't not do this. It's gonna eat me alive."
Logan's jaw shifted. "So you're going," he said.
I didn't say yes.
He looked out at the garden. The muscle along his jaw worked once.
He thinks I'm being an idiot, I thought. He's standing here watching me voluntarily walk back into Easthaven's orbit and he thinks it's stupid and I don't actually think he's wrong.
But I'm going anyway. Some things you do because you'll hate yourself if you don't.
The car was quiet. Logan was beside me and he wasn't looking at me.
Is he mad? I looked at his profile. He looks mad. Or he looks the way he usually looks and I'm projecting.
But he agreed to drive me.
Except he didn't say he agreed to anything. He said come on and walked toward the car and I followed him, which means I still don't actually have permission.
I turned that over for a minute.
What even is permission in this context? He's my trainer. He runs the evaluation. He is not my Alpha, he is not my partner, he is technically my employer and there is absolutely no framework in which managing my personal visit schedule falls inside that job description.
Unless he's just the kind of person who manages everything.
Is he?
I genuinely don't know what to call what he's doing.
And I'm smart enough to know that I should not think too hard about it.
The car stopped.
I looked out the window.
The address I'd memorized three years ago. I stared at it for a second. Then I turned and looked at Logan.
He was looking straight ahead. "Go," he said. "Say what you need to say." A pause. "Don't take long."
My throat closed.
I reached for the door handle. "You don't have to wait. I can get a—"
He turned his head.
The look he gave me was not complicated. It was the version of his face that meant don't finish that sentence and I will not discuss this and approximately five other things, all delivered in three seconds of eye contact.
I got out of the car.
The address hadn't changed.
I don't know why I expected it to. I'd been here a hundred times in three years, pulled up to the same stone front, the same iron mailbox with the bent latch that Harold kept saying he'd fix and never did. Same pair of cedar trees flanking the front steps, same yellow light spilling through the side window.
The Remington ancestral home. Not the pack house where Keaton and I had lived — this place was slower.
The door opened before I knocked.
Margaret was there, hand already on the frame, like she'd heard the car from inside and had been waiting. She looked thinner than I remembered.
"You came," she said.
"Of course I came." My voice came out softer than I meant it to. "How are you feeling?"
She stepped back to let me in. "Come inside first."
Harold was in the hallway. He had his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and a book under one arm, and when he saw me his face did the thing it always did — just opened.
"Emery." He said my name like it was something he was relieved to still have.
"Hi, Harold."
He took my jacket without asking, the way he'd done every single time I'd come through that door, and hung it on the second hook from the left.
The smell of the house hit me somewhere below the chest. Old wood and something sweet, sugar and warmth, the particular combination that meant someone had been baking. There was always something baking in this house. I used to think Margaret did it on purpose — that she understood, instinctively, that the fastest way to make someone feel safe was to make a house smell like food.
I sat down on the couch. Margaret sat across from me.
I was remembering the first time I'd been in this room. Three months into the marriage, terrified I was going to say the wrong word in front of the wrong elder, and Margaret had poured me tea and said, very simply: I don't expect you to know everything at once. I expect you to pay attention.
She'd made that so easy to do.
"How's the cardiac situation, really?" I asked.
Margaret folded her hands in her lap. Her expression didn't change, but something in her eyes did. "There was no cardiac situation," she said.
I stared at her.
"I told Keaton I'd been having some episodes. Heart irregularities." She said it evenly, like she was reading from a list. "I said the doctor suggested I might need a procedure."
"And?"
"There's no procedure." She looked at me steadily. "There's no doctor. I went in for a regular check last month and was told I am, in fact, irritatingly healthy for my age."
I opened my mouth.
"If I had told Keaton I simply wanted to see both of you," she said, before I could get there, "he would have sent flowers and called it handled. This—" She paused. "This worked."
Something cracked open in my chest that I couldn't identify immediately. It took me a second to realize it was hurt. "Margaret." My voice came out weird. "You can't just—"
"I know I can't." She said it quietly. "I know. But I needed to see you, and I needed Keaton here, and this was the only way I knew how." She looked at her hands. "I'm not proud of it."
I was halfway to standing. My brain was running: I should leave. I said what I needed to say. I showed up, I saw her, she's fine, the whole premise was—
But she was still looking at her hands with an expression that had guilt in it, and I had known this woman for three years, and I had never once seen her look like she owed anyone an apology for anything.
Then I heard it.
The front door.
My spine went straight before the rest of me had caught up.
Margaret's face didn't change. She just set her cup down.
Harold appeared in the kitchen doorway.
Keaton came in first.
He hadn't seen me yet. His head was turned back toward the door, one hand out behind him — and then Alora came through, and his hand found the small of her back, and he guided her in.