Page 42 of The Last Great Omegaverse

“And now?” I ask, because somebody has to.

“And now I think I finally understand the difference between building a life around somebody, and building a life that’s just better with somebody in it.” Cal looks up, calm despite whatever it’s costing him to say this at seven in the morning. “My father didn’t fall apart because he loved my mother too much. He fell apart because he’d never let himself be anything except her husband. No orchard of his own. No bees. No friends who weren’t hers first. When she was gone there wasn’t a version of him left standing that wasn’t built entirely out of her.”

I understand where he’s coming from. But this is Wren we’re talking about. I clench my fists while I try to hold my tongue from lashing out.

Cal looks around the table, at the three of us, at a kitchen that’s been ours for years before Wren ever arrived. “We’re not that. Whatever happens with Wren, none of us stops being exactly who we already are without her. That’s the whole difference. That’s the whole reason I think this is safe to want, when my father’s version of it never was.”

I breathe a sigh of relief.

“That’s a good argument,” Silas says slowly, “But it’s important to remember, that any of us could go that way if we’re not careful. Doesn’t mean we don’t try. Just means we go in with our eyes open about which parts of ourselves we’re not willing to hand over, even to this.”

“So we go slow,” Coop says. “We don’t have to solve the whole of forever over breakfast. We just have to decide if we’re willing to try, eyes open, watching for the parts that used to swallow people whole in this family. That’s not nothing either. That’s actually a lot, coming from people who grew up watching exactly how badly this can go.”

Nobody argues with that. It’s not a resolution, just an agreement to keep walking toward something with the lights on instead of pretending the danger isn’t real. I think, watching Cal’s face relax into something calmer than it’s looked all morning, that maybe that’s the most honest kind of commitment available to any of us. Not certainty it’ll be fine, just a shared, clear-eyed decision to risk it anyway, together, the same way we’ve done everything else since the four of us first found each other.

We get back to eating but I can’t stop the churning in my stomach. I thought agreeing to pursue Wren would help, but it’s only part of the reason for my mood this morning.

“You alright?” Coop asks, watching me closer than I’d like.

“Fine.” I’m not, particularly, but this isn’t my morning to be the one falling apart, not with Cal already carrying the weight of having delivered the news in the first place. “Just thinking.”

“About?”

“About whether I’m actually necessary to any of this, or just convenient.” It comes out more honest than I planned on being so early in the morning over lukewarm coffee. “You guys bring value to her farm. You’re practical and I’m just the guy who bought her a cider that first night.”

Silas sets his mug down harder than necessary, and something in me answers it before I’ve decided to let it, some instinct older than the argument itself bristling at the flat authority in his voice. It’s not a challenge, it’s just what happens when one Alpha plants his feet like that in a kitchen four of us call home. “That’s not true.”

“It’s the practical read of the situation.”

“It’s the read you’re choosing because it confirms something you already believed about yourself before any of this started.” He fixes me with the unimpressed look he usually reserves for equipment he’s decided is beyond saving. “I spent weeks doing the exact same math with a different set of numbers. Wondering whether wanting her was really about her, or about the land solving my pack’s debt. I ran that math into the ground, Asher, and here’s what I came out the other side with: everyone in this pack is valuable. We’re all cogs in the same engine. We lose one, we stop working.”

“Easy for you to say.”

Silas’s voice softens, just slightly, enough that I hear the effort behind it, “You’re doing what you always do. Deciding you’re the disposable one before anybody’s actually told you that, so you can be right about your own worthlessness instead of risking somebody proving you wrong.”

That lands harder than I’d like, mostly because he’s not wrong, and I don’t have a clever enough comeback ready to deflect it the way I usually would.

“Wren asked me a question on her porch a while back,” I say, more reserved now, working through it out loud. “What I actually wanted, for myself, not what I’m good at getting other people to agree to. Nobody’s ever asked me that seriously in my whole life. She did. That was her, choosing to look past the easy version of me and ask for the real one instead.” I look up, catching Silas’s eye, then Coop’s, then Cal’s, still quiet at the head of the table. “Maybe that’s the part I need to hold onto.”

“There it is,” Coop says gently, the first thing he’s said in a while. “That’s the part that matters.”

“So what do we do,” I ask, “sit here feeling sorry for ourselves until she decides whether she wants any of this ?”

“No.” Coop’s answer comes fast, certain, no hesitation in it at all. “I say we go to her. Today. Not to argue her out of being scared, she’s got a right to that, land or no land, but just to be there. Show up the way we’ve been showing up since day one, and let her see that showing up hasn’t changed.”

“She might not want company,” Silas says.

“Then we respect that if she tells us so directly. But we don’t just sit here in this kitchen assuming she’s made up her mind already, when for all we know she’s sitting in that house right now wishing somebody would knock.”

Cal’s been quiet through most of this, working something over that I can see costing him even from across the table.

“I should be the one who goes first,” he says, and something in the register of it—certain, the pitch Cal’s voice drops into maybe twice a year—hushes the room before anyone’s agreed to a word of it. It’s not that we’re afraid to argue with him. It’s that some old, unspoken part of all three of us recognizes pack leader when we hear it, and knows better than to talk over it.

“Cal—”

“I’m the one who told her. I’m the one who let seven weeks pass without saying anything, decided on my own what she was and wasn’t ready to hear, and I owe her the chance to be angry at me before the rest of you show up asking for anything.” He looks around the table. “Not because I think I matter more than the rest of you in this. Because I’m the one who broke something last night, and I’d rather be the one who tries to help put it back together first, on her terms, before we descend on her as a group and make her feel outnumbered on top of everything else she’s already carrying.”

Nobody argues with that. It feels right in a way none of us are inclined to second-guess.