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He would bite. He would bite me and fuck me and it was all… wrong. He could not bond me. And the bond sickness, it always came back, no matter how it was eased when we were connected.

I remembered him holding me, sobbing like his heart was broken.

“But it was his fault,” I said out loud to my wolf. “And there was no one to help me. To help you. I put you to sleep, but it was for your own good.”

The wolf inside me whined. The wolf inside me raged. The wolf inside me wanted out.

WHEN I GOT to my dad’s cabin, it still looked the same. Maybe a little more rickety than it used to, I supposed, but also in better shape. It had been given a new layer of paint sometime recently, and someone had rebuilt the deck in the front, the one that overlooked the road and the river beyond. I pulled in under the deck and parked. My dad’s car was not there.

On the door, he’d left me a note, saying that he was out helping the Gibsons because their goats had chewed through the fence again.

I shook my head. Still? Seriously? How had they not put in a goat-proof fence in twenty years?

I let myself into the cabin, musing that maybe goats ate everything, that maybe there was no goat-proof fence.

Inside, the cabin was clean but spartan. My father had never redecorated after my mother had taken most of the homey touches out of the place. When we’d first bought the cabin, it had come furnished, and my mother had slowly, over the years, replaced everything there with her own furnishings—pictures and candles and knick-knacks and all those sort of things. My father had never much cared about that stuff after she left. When I was a teenager—fifteen through seventeen—living here, I hadn’t been much for decorating the house either, sticking to my room.

I went straight there and pushed the door open.

Wow. My dad had not done much with the space. When I’d gone to college, I had taken some of my posters off the wall, and my dad had not replaced them. There were bare spots over the bed, bare spots across from the closet. Otherwise, all the things I had liked as a teenage girl were right there. A big poster of Chuck Bass, a framed print of a shimmering white unicorn with a girl in a long white dress with her arms wrapped around its neck, another poster of Coldplay.

I set my bag down on my bed and opened my closet. Hell, I had left a lot of clothes here. All of my oversized shirts that I used to wear with thick, chunky necklaces. I opened a drawer in my dresser to see all my pairs of leggings all folded next to each other.

I opened the next drawer up and there were all of my swimsuits. I held them up, one little tiny string bikini after another. I hadn’t even thought to bring a swimsuit. I could not believe I jumped in the river in these things. The current hadn’t torn them off?

I found my only one-piece. I had liked it because it was asymmetrical, off one arm, a little ruffle across the front of it, going over one side of my cleavage. Why had I left this one here? I should have brought this.

I held it up, wondering if it would even fit me anymore. I had gained weight in fifteen years. I don’t think anyone is as thin as she was at seventeen at thirty-two. But I didn’t look bad either. I ate salads for lunch and walked everywhere in the city. I didn’t even own a car. I didn’t really exercise or eat healthy, not really, but I cared. I tried. Sort of.

It wasn’t for a man or anything, I mused as I took off my clothes and pulled on the one-piece swimsuit.

I could date. I could do casual flings and even three-month relationships, but men tended to notice when things were supposed to be getting serious, that there was something sort of off about me. They would express it different ways.

I just feel like, when we’re making love, like you’re not really there, like you’re somewhere else.

You check out sometimes. You seem sort of out of it.

It’s just that you don’t seem to really like me, I don’t think, not as much as I like you.

You’re not letting me in.

Can I show you a TikTok about avoidant attachment styles?

If you tell me what you want, I’ll be what you want, but you never seem to even try.

Anyway, lately, for the past few years, I had given up on it, even the hookups at bars. And there were always opportunities for hookups, because men tried to pick me up a lot. It came with the omega territory, I suppose. I always looked like something that they wanted, something that they thought they should chase, should attain. And they couldn’t. Attain me, I mean. So, then, they blamed me for it.

Back in the beginning, I used to explain that I had a scent match, that he left me for someone else, that I had some unhealed ragged edge inside me, but this only made men weird and competitive with this specter of some other man that they had never met. Eventually, it seemed better to leave it out, to stay quiet.

The bathing suit still looked good, actually. The ruffle accented the swell of my breasts, and the asymmetrical ruffle drew the eye there instead of to the little pouch of my belly or to my thighs, which were a lot thicker than they were the last time I wore this thing. But it fit.

And before I even quite knew what I was doing, I was grabbing a towel from the hall closet and going out of the cabin, down the stairs outside to the road, looking both ways, scampering across the cracked pavement, and then onto the dock that sat out on the water.

I shed the towel and set down my phone, which I’d brought out here with me. I took off at a run and dove right into the water.

I swam out into the middle of the river, treading water out there, as I tested how intense the current was. It was not too bad. I could stay here for a bit, I thought. I could manage this, even though I wasn’t used to swimming anymore, even though I didn’t have the stamina that I once had.

I ducked down, swimming down into the water and then surfaced, and when I did, I could not believe my eyes, because there was a canoe heading for me.