Page 35 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
"What about yours?" he turns it back with the same directness he always uses. "What did Sunday dinners look like?"
I consider the honest answer. "Structured," I tell him. "My mother had a seating arrangement. Literal place cards, even for family dinners, because she said they prevented the wrong conversations from happening."
Logan's stare fixates on me from across the long table. "The wrong conversations."
"The ones that couldn't be controlled," I clarify. "My family—we weren't unkind to each other. It wasn't that. It was that everything had a format. How you dressed for dinner, what subjects were acceptable, what image the family was presenting to whoever was at the table." I pull a piece of bread apart without eating it. "I spent a lot of time as a kid trying to figure out which version of myself was the right one for the room I was in."
"And outside the rooms?"
I look at him. "There wasn't really an outside the rooms. That's the thing I didn't understand until recently." I pause. "There was always a room. Always someone watching the performance."
His face bypasses pity entirely—what lands there instead is a quiet recognition that lands differently than sympathy would.
"That's exhausting," he says simply.
Two words. No follow-up, no advice, no reframing it into something more manageable. Simply acknowledged. Seen. I look down at my coffee and feel something loosen in my chest that I didn't know was still tight.
"Yeah," I reply quietly. "It really was."
Outside, the rain comes down against the window in long diagonal sheets, and the television in the corner flickers through weather maps nobody is watching. Somewhere in the diner, a child at another table says something that makes its parents laugh, and the sound of it—easy, unguarded—moves through the room and dissolves.
"Did you choose the nonprofit work?" Logan finally questions. "Or did someone choose it for you?"
The directness of it catches me, the way his questions always do. Straight to the actual thing. No detour, no cushioning, just the question itself. "I chose it," I tell him and mean it. "That part was mine. I genuinely believed in the work." I pause. "But the rest of it—the city, the social circle, Dawson—" I stop. "I think I followed a map that someone else drew and told myself I'd chosen the route."
"Who drew it?"
"Everyone," I reply. "My mother, partly. The expectations of the family. And then Dawson, who was very good at making his preferences look like my decisions." I look at the bread in my hands. "By the time I noticed the map wasn't mine, I was already five years down the road."
Logan nods slowly, and the nod itself tells me he understands that particular thing the way you only understand something you've lived from the inside.
"The people up there," I venture, because something has been sitting with me since the conversation on the porch that first night. "It seems like keeping them safe, keeping everything together—that takes up a lot of you."
He doesn't deflect it. "It does," he replies. "My grandfather brought the first people onto that land. My father built on it, added people, and grew it into something that could actually sustain a community. By the time it came to me, there was already a generation of people whose lives were tied to that place." He turns his water glass slowly on the table. "You don't inherit something like that and treat it as property. You inherit the responsibility for everything your family built and everyone they brought in."
"That's a heavy thing to carry," I offer quietly.
"It is," he agrees, without complaint or performance. "But my father used to say you don't protect a place. You protect the people in it. The place is simply what holds them." He pauses. "I've never found a reason to disagree with that."
"Did you ever want to put it down?" I ask. "Even for a little while."
He thinks about it genuinely. "No," he replies finally. "There were moments early on, when all of it was new and everything landed at once, where I understood how a person could. But no." A pause. "They're mine. That changes the math on it entirely."
I watch him say it—the complete absence of resentment, the way he holds the responsibility like something he'd reach for again if it were taken—and feel a pull toward that I don't entirely know what to do with.
Logan leans forward slightly, both forearms on the table, and the movement brings him a few inches closer in the small space of the booth. I don't move back.
"What would you have drawn?" he asks. "If the map had been yours from the start."
Nobody has ever asked me that. Not once. The simplicity of it—the directness, the quiet assumption that the answer exists and is worth knowing—sits somewhere in my chest and doesn't move.
"I don't know yet," I admit. "I'm starting to think that's okay."
"It's more than okay," he replies. "Most people never get to the starting over part."
I look at him—the steady gray eyes, the unhurried attention, both forearms still on the table, close enough that I'm aware of the warmth of him across the small space between us—and feel something that I have been keeping at a careful distance move closer without asking permission.
"What about you?" I redirect because I need a beat. "Did you ever want something specifically for yourself?"
