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“She ended it,” he said. “She told me she wanted a partner, not somebody who showed up when everyone else was finished with him.”

I grimaced. “Ouch. That must’ve hurt.”

“It did.”

“Did you think she was right?”

“Eventually.” He glanced toward me. “At the time, I thought she didn’t understand duty. Now I think she understood that I used duty to avoid making choices.”

“What do you mean?”

“If the pack needed me, then I never had to decide what I wanted. The need made the decision.”

I understood that too well. Work had done the same thing for me. Deadlines decided my evenings. Clients decided my weekends. Money decided whether I could rest. My parents decided what counted as progress, and fear decided which relationships were too dangerous to enter.

Need created an excellent cover.

“So neither of us knows what we’re doing,” I said.

Hudson’s mouth curved. “Apparently not.”

“That seems promising.”

“Hey, at least we’re self-aware.”

“Self-awareness is often the first step toward a more sophisticated mistake,” I said.

He laughed. The sound filled my kitchen again, warmer now that it belonged only to us. As I looked at him, I felt the full weight of the evening. The flour on his cheek. The photograph tucked into my purse. Holding hands as we walked through the park. His admission that he wanted to spend time with me deliberately.

I had wanted this my entire life without knowing the shape of it. Not only romance. People.

A village.

Someone arriving with junk food and a ridiculous presentation because she noticed I needed help. A man remembering where I kept bowls because he’d seen it in one photograph. A family expecting me at the next birthday dinner. A hundred-year-old grandfather whose pie had become a community emergency.

I’d spent years believing belonging would arrive after I became accomplished enough, social enough, stable enough, and certain enough to deserve it. Instead, it arrived through a wrong number. That simple mistake had given me more connection than every correct decision I’d made before it.

“It’s strange,” I said.

“What is?”

“This.” I gestured around the kitchen.

“The pie?”

“Everything.”

Hudson waited.

“I bake because it makes the apartment feel less empty,” I said. “I make twelve cupcakes, eat two, and stare at the rest because I have nobody to give them to.”

His face softened.

“Now Patty shows up without permission, you’re standing in my kitchen covered in flour, and an entire family is waiting for us to deliver pie tomorrow.”

“You don’t have to deliver it.”

“That’s not the point.”