Page 87 of Knot the Plan
“You're very rude to me.”
“I'm veryhonestwith you. It's different. It's my best quality.” He forks up a bite of the wreckage. “Also I'm the only one who tells you the truth without making it a whole federal event, so eat your pie and let me be your favorite for ten minutes.”
I laugh. It surprises me, comes out of somewhere under all the dread, and he grins around his fork, delighted, because making me laugh when I don't want to is Hudson's entire love language and he knows he just scored.
We eat pie on my steps and don't talk about anything. He tells me a long stupid story about Beckett Fletcher and a canoe and a goose that may or may not be true. He does not ask why my eyes are pink. He does not ask why I flinched off him inthe garden, or why I'm wearing my scratchiest cardigan inside out, or why I've got the specific fragile look of a woman holding something heavy over her head with both arms.
He just stays. Warm and loud and easy at my side, filling the quiet so I don't have to, asking nothing, taking up space next to me like a wall you're allowed to lean on.
And I want to tell him. That's the terrible part. Sitting here in the last of the light with juniper and pie and Hudson's dumb goose story, I want to lean into his side and tell him all of it.
The bottle. The heat. The four pills. The way I've started planning how to give all three of them back before they work out I'm the one who fell. I want to tell him because Hudson is the easiest person in the world to tell things to. That's his trick. That's his gift.
I don't. Because telling him is the first domino, and I know exactly where the dominoes end.
When the pie's gone he stands, stretches, and pulls me up off the step, and before he lets go he does the small thing that undoes me every time, the one that asks for nothing back — he ducks and presses a quick warm kiss to the top of my head, the way you'd gentle a kid or a spooked horse, casual as breathing.
“You'd tell me,” he says. Not a question. Quiet, under the easy. “If it was bad. You'd tell one of us.”
“It's not bad.” Four pills. A date on a spreadsheet. “I'm just tired, Hudson.”
He looks at me a second longer, and I watch him decide to let me have it, the way you let someone have a lie they need.
“Okay, Porter.” He squeezes my hand once and lets go. “I'm around. You know where the store is. You know where I am.” The grin comes back, full wattage, the curtain dropping. “Try not to die fighting a root. It's an embarrassing obituary and I'd have to give the eulogy and I'd roast you.”
He lopes back to his truck. Waves out the window without looking. Pulls out.
And I stand in my garden in the dark-coming light with the taste of bad pie in my mouth and the warm ghost of a kiss on the top of my head, and I think, with a clarity that scares me, one clean unbearable thought.
I'm going to lose this.
This. Them. Hudson on my steps with a bad pie and a kiss on my head. Finn. Logan. Three alphas who show up for me like it's nothing, like I'm easy to show up for.
And I'm not going to lose it because anyone takes it. I'm going to lose it because I'm going to end it myself, on purpose, before they can figure out I'm the one who fell — that somewhere in all this pretending, I stopped pretending, and they didn't.
That was always the plan. Wind it down, hand them back their lives, walk away first. I just didn't count on it feeling like this. Like giving away the only thing I've ever actually wanted, with my own two hands.
The root is still in the garden bed, undefeated. I leave it. Some things you don't get to win.
I go inside, and I do not open the nightstand drawer, and I lie in the dark being tired the way I told Hudson I was tired, and I let myself have the memory of the kiss on my head for one more night before I start the work of giving them back.
Tomorrow, I tell myself. I'll start being sensible tomorrow.
My skin burns against the sheets. Under the dread, my omega body has already started counting down toward a heat no pill left in that bottle is going to hold.
Chapter 30
Hudson
The text comes in at 6:52 on a Friday morning, and I read it three times before the bottom drops out of my stomach.
Hey you three. I can't say thank you enough for these last few weeks. You saved me at the reunion, all of you, and it meant more than I know how to put in a text. But it's done now and you've more than paid me back for whatever you think you owe. You can have your lives back. Go be free men. I mean it. Thank you, truly. — J
I read it a fourth time.
On its face it's a nice text. Warm. Grateful. The kind of thing you'd screenshot and feel good about. But I've spent a month learning the difference between what Josie Porter says and what Josie Porter means, and everything under this one is wrong.
You can have your lives back.Nobody says that who's planning to see you Tuesday. That's not a thank-you. That's a door closing, dressed up nice so you won't hear the latch.
