Page 20 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
And I think, quietly and without much logic, that I'm not sure I'm ready for it to be fixed.
I don't say that out loud. I don't even let myself think it through. But it's there, sitting at the last moments of the evening like the treeline sits at the fringes of the clearing—present and undeniable and closer than it was this morning.
After dinner, when the table is being cleared and the conversation has broken into smaller pieces, Nora drops into the chair beside me and props her chin on her hand.
"You good?" she asks.
I look around the room—Declan making Lila laugh about something, Mateo and Logan talking quietly near the fire, Garrett carrying plates to the kitchen with his usual economy of movement.
"Yeah," I say. And then, more honestly: "I think I might be, actually."
Nora smiles like she already knew that and was merely waiting for me to catch up.
8
LOGAN
Inotice it first at the table.
It happened in accumulation rather than in any single moment. The way she's stopped sitting at the edge of her chair—that particular posture of someone ready to leave at short notice—and started sitting in it instead. The way she passes Declan the bread ahead of his asking, like she already knows he'll want more before he does. The way she laughed at his squirrel story was genuine and unguarded, the kind that catches a person off guard and doesn't apologize for it.
She's settling.
That's the word for it, and it does something complicated to my chest that I spend most of dinner carefully not thinking too much into it.
I settle into my end of the table, the same seat I've occupied for years—close enough to read the room, far enough to give everyone space. Same as always. The problem is thatfar enoughkeeps feeling like the wrong distance tonight, which is not a problem I can solve at the dinner table, and so I don't try.
Mateo catches my eye once, briefly, and his expression says nothing and everything simultaneously. I look back at my plate.
We're into the second hour of dinner—the loose, unhurried stretch that happens after the food is gone and nobody wants to be the first to leave—when my phone buzzes on the table. I check it.
Garrett. Three words.
Need to talk.
I catch Mateo's eye and tip my head toward the door. He's beside me in thirty seconds, quiet enough that the rest of the table doesn't break stride.
"Garrett went back into the engine," Mateo says before I can speak. He's already read the message. "More damage than he thought. Heat stress got farther than the overflow tank."
"How much longer?"
"Another day, minimum. He wants to do it right."
I nod. Garrett had slipped out right after dinner—I'd watched him go, quiet and purposeful the way he always is when something's turning over in his mind about a job. He'd said nothing at the time, simply carried his plate to the kitchen and headed back to the garage, and I'd thought nothing of it. Now I knew why.
I don't second-guess his call. It's kept the fleet running clean for six years.
"I'll tell her," I say.
Mateo nods and heads back to the table. I come around to where Harper is sitting—she's in conversation with Lila about something, leaning forward slightly the way she does when she's actually interested, not performing interest—and I wait for a natural break.
She looks up.
"Garrett went back into the engine after dinner," I say. "Found more heat damage than he expected. He needs another day to do it properly."
She takes that in. I watch her run through it—the calculation, the calendar, whatever she was planning on the other side of getting in that car. Then she exhales and nods.
"Okay," she says. "Another day."
