"She's standing right there," I say. "You could try asking her."
Derek ignores me. He turns back to Ellie. "I just want to talk. That's all. Come get coffee with me. Five minutes."
"It has been five years, Derek." Ellie's voice comes from behind the desk."I don't owe you five minutes."
"Ellie, I'm—"
"He looks like a man who returns books late and dog-ears the pages." Lily says from her table by the window, loud enough for every corner of the room. She sits with her legs crossed in the chair and the Butler open on her knee, not even looking up from her page.
Ellie's mouth twitches.
Derek looks from Lily to me to Ellie and back. The smile he arrived with has gone stiff at the edges, a mask cracking under the weight of three people in the room who aren't buying it. He smooths his collar again.
"I'll come back later," he says. "When you're not busy."
He walks past me. I don't move to make space. He turns sideways to fit through the gap between my shoulder and the door frame, the top of his head passes below my chin.
The library door closes behind him. His rental car starts in the lot. Ellie braces against the desk and exhales, a long breath that pulls the tension out of her shoulders in a single drop.
"Ellie—"
"Don't." She shakes her head. "Not right now. I'm okay."
She isn't. The stress-scent hasn't faded. But pushing her right now will cost me more than waiting. I nod.
"Lily, you ready?"
Lily packs her bag, zips it, slings it over one shoulder. She stops at the desk and squeezes Ellie's hand once. "See you Tuesday, Ellie."
"See you Tuesday, Lily."
We walk to the truck. Lily climbs in and buckles and opens her book. I sit behind the wheel. My fingers lock around the steering wheel and squeeze until the leather creaks.
"Dad?" Lily looks up from her book. "You okay?"
I loosen my grip. "Yeah, Lil. I'm good. Let's get you home."
Every instinct in my body wants to go back inside. The orc in me screams to scent-mark every inch of that building.
I start the truck instead.
The rain picks up on the drive home. Lily reads in the passenger seat, the book tilted to catch the dashboard light, and I grip the wheel and think about Derek Frost. Derek who can love a woman without a claiming bite. Without a bond that lets him feel her pulse from across the room. Derek who can lose someone and grieve like a human grieves—in memory, not in his blood and body. Derek will never feel the exact moment a heartbeat stops because his body isn't wired into hers.
The thought sits in my gut like a stone.
Lily goes to bed at nine. One chapter, she promises. I give her two because I'm too tired to argue, and her light clicks off at nine-thirty.
I stand in the hallway while the house settles around me, pipes ticking, rain on the roof, the furnace cycling down for the night. I walk to my bedroom and open the bedside drawer.
My wedding band. Gold, plain. I've picked it up every night for eight years. I hold it in my palm and I talk to her, the same way I've talked to her since the funeral, and every night I've said the same thing.I'm still here.
Tonight I turn the ring over in my fingers and look at the photograph on the nightstand. Maren at twenty-nine, pregnant with Lily, sitting on the porch steps of this house with a book in her lap and her head thrown back laughing at something I said that I can't remember.
"I met someone." My voice sounds strange in the empty room. Rough. Too loud for the silence. "She runs a library. She fought for a kid in front of a room full of people and didn't flinch." I close my fingers around the ring. "You would have liked her."
The photograph doesn't answer. Maren's face stays frozen in that laugh, twenty-nine and alive and holding our daughter in her body.
The silence in the house changes. Not the empty silence I've carried since the funeral, the one that swallows everything and gives nothing back.
