Page 31 of Knot Her Beta

My cane taps on the floor as I move through the main room. The pine floors are stained honey brown, and the chemical sweetness of the finish still hangs in the air, not quite gone.

The kitchen counter is pale gray quartz along the back wall, where someone left the overhead lights on. I lean my cane against the counter and flatten my palm on the cool surface.

My parents sent over the itinerary yesterday, with an upgraded ticket to first class, a connecting flight through Chicago, and car service from the airport to their place in Connecticut. The email included a note about dinner reservations already made for Friday night. Caroline will be there.

I didn’t ask for that. They just assumed.

Behind the kitchen, a hallway leads to the bedrooms. I don’t go down it.

Instead, I cross to the living room window. Through the gaps in the trees, I catch glimpses of the water, gray and restless beyond the shore. No one can see in. That was deliberate, too. Chloe knows I like my privacy, or what’s left of it after a year of sharing Kyle’s bathroom.

I rest my forehead on the cold glass. My breath fogs the pane.

Last night at the Homestead, Chloe and I sat at the kitchen table after dinner, and I told her about the flight. I tried to keep it simple, reassuring her that it was just to show my face to my parents and that I’d be back.

She burst into tears.

Not the dignified, understanding kind, either, but the messy, hiccupping, pregnant-hormone kind that turned my absence into Armageddon before I’d even finished the sentence.

Thank goodness Dominic was there in an instant, rubbing circles on the small of her back and murmuring reassurances into her hair. She’d buried her face in his chest and sobbed as if I’d already abandoned her.

I sat there with my untouched tea going cold, watching the way his fingers traced circles between her shoulder blades, the way she leaned into him without hesitation, and a hollow ache opened up behind my ribs.

The same hollow I felt on Saturday, watching Leif reclaim his spot at Emily’s table.

He hadn’t even needed to try. One look from those periwinkle eyes, and Emily’s walls came down as if they were made of tissue paper. She blushed. She actually blushed, this woman who handles power tools and construction crews without breaking stride, and her focus kept catching on his mouth as if she couldn’t help herself.

And Jared watched it happen with this quiet, certain smile, like he’d been waiting for it. Like the three of them were already a unit, and I was the fourth wheel, observing from the outside.

My mother’s voice slides in, the way it always does when I let my guard down, as clear as if she were standing behind me in this empty cabin.

Alphas and Omegas, Grady. They’re not like us. They run on instinct and chemistry in a way you can’t begin to understand. You’ll always be the outsider, the one who doesn’t quite fit. Find a nice Beta. Someone who sees the world the way you do.

She’d say it over breakfast, casual as the weather, while my father nodded along behind his tablet. By the time I was sixteen, it was less advice and more doctrine.

Don’t date Alphas. Don’t date Omegas. They live in a world of Heats and Ruts that will leave you stranded every time.

I believed her. For a long time, I believed her.

My hand tightens on the windowsill, the wood cool under my palm. Outside, the light is fading, afternoon sliding toward a gray dusk that means rain by morning. A crow lands on a branch not ten feet from the glass, tilts its head, and stares at me like I’m the one who doesn’t belong.

Saturday night, I’d rehearsed it on the drive over. A casual conversation that I would broach somewhere between the main course and dessert.

Hey, I’m heading to Connecticut for two weeks to visit my parents. You know how it is.

But Leif had been there when I arrived, taking up all of Emily’s attention, and the usual invitation to stay hadn’t come, and then the evening was over, and I was scraping my boots on the mat outside Kyle’s door, the paper still folded in my pocket.

I push back from the window and retrieve my cane. The knee protests, the familiar ache settling into the joint where the metal pins hold everything together. The doctor said it would get better with time. But the doctor lied, or I’m not giving it enough time, or maybe some breaks don’t heal the way they’re supposed to.

The dream of the cabin feels suddenly distant, the bookshelves I imagined lining the wall, the desk under the window, the coffee pot on the counter all recede, becoming someone else’s future. Someone who isn’t flying to Connecticut in seventy-two hours to have dinner with a woman his parents picked out, to discuss a future that has nothing to do with pine trees or island light or the ache of wanting something you can’t quite name.

My cane leaves faint marks in the dust on the floor, evidence I was here, as I head back for the door, only for a light knock to bring me up short.

Then Emily’s silver head pokes inside, and she spots me standing only a few feet away.

Grinning, she steps inside, still in her work boots, wearing a fitted flannel with the sleeves rolled to her elbows. There’s a faint smear of construction dust along her forearm, pale gray on her tanned skin.

“I had a feeling you’d be here,” she says.