Page 24 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
I push back from the table before I've consciously decided to move, and I go find Logan. I need to vent, and I know he’ll listen.
I find him splitting wood near the clearing’s boundary, working with the unhurried efficiency of someone doing a routine task. He looks up when he hears me coming, reads whatever is on my face, and sets the axe down before I've said a word.
"What happened?" he asks.
"He did a press statement." I stop a few feet away and cross my arms. "Dawson. He went on camera and told the world I had a breakdown from wedding stress and wandered off." I pause. "Those aren't his exact words. His exact words were more careful than that. But that's the story he's building."
Logan's face stays even. "What actually happened? Before you left."
I look at him for a second. It's a direct question, and he's asking it directly, which is so different from how the people in my world operate that it takes me a beat to catch up to it.
"I went looking for him before the ceremony," I tell him. "He wasn't where he was supposed to be. I found him in one of the private rooms in the east wing." I pause. "He was kissing one of his colleagues. I took his phone. There were eight months of messages. The affair started two months after we got engaged."
Logan is very still.
"And he's on camera," I continue, "looking incredibly reasonable, telling everyone I panicked under pressure." I feel the edge in my own voice and don't try to smooth it down. "He never mentions catching him. Never mentions a reason. Just pressure and stress and Harper, overwhelmed, unable to handle her own wedding."
"He's controlling the story," Logan replies. It isn't a question.
"He's been controlling everything for five years. Why would today be different?" I press two fingers to my sternum and breathe through the pressure there. "There are articles. A lot of them. Some are reporting what he said, some are speculating, and one of them—" I stop. "One of them has a headline questioning whether I have a history of instability. Which I don't. I've never—" I stop again.
"I know," Logan replies quietly.
"The worst part is that it works," I continue, because now that it's moving, it wants to keep moving. "If I surface right now and try to tell my side, I'm the unstable runaway bride contradicting her very reasonable, very concerned ex-fiancé, who only wants to make sure she's okay. I have the screenshots. I have the proof. But if I drop them now without a strategy, it just becomes a messy, ugly tabloid war." The treeline is a neutral surface, and I use it. "My own mother is going to call me, and the first thing she asks, after ‘are you safe’, is going to be ‘what are we going to do about this?' She loves me. She does. But everything in that world becomes about how it looks before it becomes about what it is—she was wired that way before I was born, and so was everyone around her."
Logan lets that settle for a moment before he replies. "How much coverage is there?"
"Enough. It's been two days, and it's already moved past local news." I exhale. "And if I go back to my real life right now, even with the proof, I don't have a single answer for what comes next. I don't know what I want to say, I don't have a plan, and I'm not ready to walk back into that world and figure it out under a microscope."
"Then you don't," he replies plainly. "I can get you out of the mountains quietly when you're ready—back roads, nothing public. But there's no reason to move before you have what youneed." He meets my eyes. "The word, and we go. Whenever that is."
I look at him—this man who keeps handing me options instead of decisions, who keeps asking what I want instead of telling me what makes sense—and feel the particular disorientation of not being managed.
"I don't want to go back yet," I admit. The words come out quieter than I intend them to. "Not to any of it. Not to my mother's questions or the articles or Dawson's press statement or the version of events everyone is building without me." I pause. "I need time. Real time, away from all of it, before I walk back in and execute my response. When I drop those screenshots, there is no going back."
"That's not the same as hiding," Logan replies evenly.
"I know." The mountains surrounding the clearing have no opinion about Dawson Whitaker's charcoal suit or his careful, concerned expression, which is exactly what I need from them right now. "I need to figure out what I actually think before everyone else tells me what to think. I've never had that. Space to land somewhere before the next thing starts."
Logan immediately has no words. "Then take it," he replies simply. "There's no deadline on getting your bearings."
"It might look worse," I tell him. "The longer I'm away from my real life?—"
"It might," he agrees, and the honesty of it is more steadying than any reassurance would be. "But walking back in before you're ready will also look like something. Only you know which one you can live with."
I'm quiet for a moment, turning that over.
"I'm not sad," I tell him, and I mean it. "That's the thing I keep coming back to. I found him kissing someone else the morning of our wedding, and I should be devastated, and mostly I feel—" I search for the word. "Clarified."
His eyes linger on me for a long moment. "That's not nothing," he replies finally. "That's you knowing what was real and what wasn't."
I exhale slowly.
"I need some time," I tell him again, more to myself than to him. "Before I go back and become the story. Before everyone gets to have an opinion about what I should do next." I straighten up. "That's all I know right now."
"That's enough to know," Logan replies.
He picks the ax back up. I understand that means the conversation is settled and he's not going to make a production of it, which is exactly right.
