Page 63 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
The humor reaches her eyes before her mouth decides what to do with it. "You're infuriating, you know that?"
"You've mentioned it," I agree.
She looks back at the treeline. So do I. And we sit in the evening quiet together, the pack running its patrols somewhere out in the dark, Dawson's people working their way toward a mountain they don't know nearly well enough, and Harper, beside me on these steps, choosing, again, to stay.
My wolf settles.
Some things, it turns out, are worth every bit of the wait.
23
HARPER
The next morning, I wake up with a plan.
Not a vague intention—an actual plan, the kind that arrives fully formed somewhere between sleep and consciousness when your brain has been working on a problem without your permission. I lie in the early light and let it come into focus, and by the time I'm dressed and downstairs, it has the kind of shape I can work with.
I've been thinking about Dawson's press statement since the moment I watched it on the hardwired laptop in the lodge. Not with the cold, flat anger of that first viewing—that's settled into something more useful now, something closer to resolve. I've had a morning that rearranged my entire understanding of the mountain I'm living on, and the particular effect of having your world turned inside out is that everything else becomes very clear in comparison. Dawson's carefully constructed narrative. The story he's been telling while I've been here. The gap between that story and what actually happened.
I know how to close that gap. I've been closing gaps in narratives for five years—making complicated situations make sense, building timelines that hold up under scrutiny, andfinding the place where the version of events starts to contradict itself. I am, as it turns out, extremely well-equipped for exactly this.
So after breakfast, I head into the pack office—a small room off the main lodge with a proper desk and the hardwired laptop—and I get to work.
The first thing I do is watch everything.
All of it, including the press statements I found before. I search Dawson's name, and I watch every clip that surfaces—three television interviews, two radio spots posted online, a press statement from his company's communications team, and a handful of social media posts from people in our former social circle that tell me exactly what version of events has been circulating in that world for these past days.
The picture that emerges is consistent and deliberate.
Dawson, in interview one, leaning forward with the practiced look of a man unburdening himself:"Harper has been struggling with stress and anxiety for some time. The pressure of the wedding, the public nature of our relationship—I think it became too much. I should have seen the signs earlier. I blame myself for that."
Dawson, in interview two, was quieter this time, more measured, and had the tone of a man who had had some time to compose himself into something more sympathetic:"She's not well. I want people to understand that. This isn't about the wedding or about us. This is about a woman who needed help and didn't know how to ask for it and who made a decision in a moment of crisis that I think, when she's thinking clearly, she'll want to talk about."
Dawson in interview three—and this one I have to watch twice because the specific construction of it is so deliberate; I want to make sure I'm cataloging it accurately—sitting in a leather chair in what looks like his office, the picture ofcomposed, reluctant concern:"I love Harper. I have always loved Harper. What happened on our wedding day was a symptom of something she's been carrying for a long time, and my only regret is that I didn't do more to support her before it reached that point. I'm not angry. I'm worried. And my door is open whenever she's ready to come home."
I sit with that last one for a moment.
My door is open whenever she's ready to come home.
He didn’t say, ‘I made a mistake’ or ‘I owe her an explanation’. Not a single word about a colleague in a green dress or a phone full of eight months of messages or the fact that he was in a private room with another woman forty-two minutes before the ceremony he is now publicly mourning.
Only: she's not well. She's struggling. Come home.
I close the laptop with more control than I feel and sit with my hands flat on the desk.
Then I open it again, because sitting with my hands flat on a desk has never solved a single problem in my life, and I am not starting now.
I haven't forgotten the smoking gun. I've known exactly what is sitting in my inbox.
The screenshots.
Even in shock, I took them in that room while Dawson was still talking, hands moving on the autopilot that five years of event coordination had built into me—photograph the contract, photograph the delivery confirmation, and photograph anything that might later become someone's word against yours. I didn't decide to do it. I just did it, sending it to my email, letting the practical part of me run on a separate track from the part that was standing in a wedding dress, watching her life come apart at the seams.
And then I walked out. And the mountain road happened, and the dark happened, and the cabin happened. I've knownthose screenshots were waiting for me like a live grenade. I just hadn't been ready to pull the pin. Releasing them meant going to war. It meant tying my name to a massive, ugly public scandal before I even knew who I was without him.
But I know now.
I haven't let myself go back. Not once. Not until right now, sitting in this office with the morning light coming through the window and a plan taking shape and Dawson's voice still coming out of the laptop speaker telling the world I'm unstable. I’m finally ready for the fallout.
