My Alpha Forgot Our Love

Diane discharged him two days after the crash.

I knew it was coming. She'd told me the night before — stable vitals, no new bleeding, the clot holding steady for now. She said it with the careful neutrality of someone delivering information they know will land like a stone in still water.

I thanked her and went home and told Kason we were having pancakes for dinner.

He didn't ask about his father. He hadn't asked once since the crash. He just climbed onto the kitchen counter stool and watched me pour batter into the pan with the focused attention of a child who has learned that the present moment is the safest place to live.

I understood that logic completely.

---

I heard about the pack house incident from Marcus.

He came to the cottage around noon, standing on my porch with his hands in his jacket pockets and the particular expression he wore when he was delivering news he hadn't been asked to deliver.

"He tried to go back to the east wing," Marcus said. "The warriors at the door told him it was restricted. He stood there for about ten minutes."

"And?"

"He didn't argue." Marcus paused. "He just stood there. Then he picked up his bag and walked away."

I had exercised my Luna authority the morning after the crash — a quiet, formal instruction to the pack house security that the east wing and family quarters were closed to Arthur until further notice. It was within my rights. It was, in fact, one of the only rights I had left that hadn't been quietly eroded over the last several years.

I had expected him to push back. The Arthur I knew — the one who'd accepted my rejection without looking up from his desk — would have used his Alpha tone and walked through anyway.

This one didn't.

"Where is he now?" I asked.

Marcus looked past me toward the tree line at the edge of the cottage grounds. "Setting up a tent, looks like. About thirty yards from your front gate."

I turned and looked.

He was there. A dark figure in the late afternoon light, driving a stake into the ground with the focused, methodical energy of someone who has decided that this is the task in front of them and they are going to do it correctly. A canvas tent, a camp lantern, a folded sleeping bag. Pack members were watching from the main grounds — I could feel the weight of it, that particular pack-wide attention that meant something had shifted in the hierarchy and everyone was recalibrating.

I watched him for a moment.

Then I went back inside and made Kason's dinner.

---

The smell reached me before I opened the door.

Honeysuckle tea. Pan-fried eggs with the herbs from the pack garden — thyme and a little rosemary, the combination I'd liked when we were nineteen and cooking on a two-burner stove in the first pack house, which had been barely more than a converted farmhouse with a leaking roof. Toast, slightly overdone at the edges. The specific kind of overdone I'd always preferred, which I had mentioned exactly once, years ago, in passing, the way you mention small things to someone you assume will always be there to remember them.

I stood in the doorway for a moment.

The plate was on the porch step. A single wildflower beside it — something small and yellow from the meadow at the property's edge. The fire he'd built was still going, a low steady burn, and he was sitting beside it with his back to the cottage, giving me the privacy of not being watched.

I picked up the plate.

I stood there holding it and looked at the back of his head and felt the dull, familiar ache move through me like weather. Not the sharp pain of the early years, when every reminder of what we'd been felt like a fresh cut. Something older than that. The ache of a wound that had healed wrong and would always pull a little when the temperature changed.

I brought the plate inside.

Kason was already at the table, still in his school clothes, his backpack dropped by the door in the specific way that meant he'd had a good morning. I set the plate in front of him.

"Eggs," he said, with the decisive approval of a six-year-old who has strong opinions about breakfast foods.

"Eat," I said.

He ate. He didn't ask where they came from. I didn't tell him.

I stood at the kitchen window and watched the smoke from Arthur's fire rise into the pale morning sky and pressed my thumb against the inside of my wrist and thought about nothing in particular.

Or tried to.

---

The third morning, Arthur was at the cottage gate when we came out.

Kason saw him first. He went very still — that particular stillness he'd inherited from me, the one that meant he was processing something he hadn't prepared for. Then he reached up and took my hand, pressing himself against my side without a word.

Arthur stood at the gate with his hands loose at his sides. He wasn't blocking the path. He wasn't performing anything. He was just there, in a clean shirt, his hair still damp from whatever camp-washing he'd managed, looking at us with those open, undefended eyes that still hadn't learned to hide anything.

"I thought I could walk with you," he said. Not to me. To Kason.

Kason said nothing. He looked at the ground.

I didn't fill the silence. It wasn't mine to fill.

Arthur didn't push. He just fell into step behind us — three paces back, far enough to give Kason the space his body was asking for, close enough that the distance wasn't a dismissal. He didn't try to make conversation. He didn't narrate the walk or point things out or do any of the effortful things adults do when they are desperate to be noticed by a child who has decided not to notice them.

He just walked.

The bus stop was at the end of the pack grounds' main path, where the gravel met the road. Three other pack pups were already there with their parents, and I felt the shift in the air when we arrived — the quick, careful glances, the way conversations paused and resumed at a slightly different register. Everyone knew. Packs always knew.

Kason climbed the bus steps without looking back.

But when the bus pulled away, I watched him through the window. He had taken the seat on the right side — the side facing us — and he was looking out. Not at me. At Arthur, who was standing two steps behind me with his hands in his pockets, watching the bus go.

Kason's expression was not hatred. It wasn't even anger. It was something more careful than either of those things — the face of a child doing a calculation he didn't have all the numbers for yet, weighing something he couldn't quite name against a wall he'd spent years building and wasn't ready to take down.

The bus turned the corner and was gone.

Arthur stood there for another moment after it disappeared. Then he said, quietly, to no one in particular: "He has your eyes."

I didn't answer.

I turned and walked back toward the cottage, and I heard his footsteps stop at the gate, and I did not look back.