Page 18 of What We Don't Say: Part Two

He types one word.

Test.

He hits send.

The phone in Idris’ hand lights before Sloane’s screen shows delivered. A notification slides down across Garrett’s open screen with Sloane’s name attached to it, clean and impossible and bright enough to carve the room in half. Sloane goes silent above me. Idris holds Garrett’s phone like evidence and a blade, and across the screen, under Callie’s disconnected number, Sloane Rivera’s message waits inside the wrong man’s phone.

Theo

Garrett’s phone is gone from my hands now, returned to the place where he’ll expect to find it, but I can still feel the shape of it in my palm.

By evening, the sunroom is too bright to survive. Dr. Mercer left less than an hour ago, and the notes she gave Idris are still folded on the low table beside Sloane’s glass of water. Hydration. Quiet environment. No additional emotional stressors. No unsupervised confrontation with a destabilizing presence. She didn’t say Garrett’s name when she wrote that last part, but hermouth had tightened, and Sloane had made a sound behind me that turned my bones cold.

I’m curled on the floor beside the second nest, the one Idris helped me build when we still thought the house might remember how to be gentle. My knees are tucked against my chest, and Callie’s sweater is twisted in both hands. I’ve held it so tightly all afternoon that my fingers have started to cramp around the fabric. It smells faint now, honeyed pear and vanilla tea worn thin by too many days against my face, but it’s still hers. It’s still the only thing in the room that doesn’t ask me to believe a lie.

Sloane’s water sits near my knee, cold and honest in a plain glass. He brought it before he went to the kitchen to get the food Dr. Mercer told him to make me try. He crouched when he set it down, keeping himself lower than me even though he looked like standing was the only thing holding him together. His hands shook when he touched my hair. I pretended not to notice because he pretended not to notice when I leaned into it.

The sunroom door opens before Sloane comes back.

I know Garrett by the pause first. That small, deliberate silence he brings with him, like the house is supposed to settle around his arrival and be grateful for the chance. Then his scent reaches me, cold mint and polished leather, too clean for a room where I’ve been sweating through interrupted heat and fear. My body folds smaller before I can tell it not to. I press Callie’s sweater to my mouth, and the wool drags rough against my lips.

“Theo,” Garrett says, softly enough that someone outside the room might call him patient. He has a porcelain cup in one hand and a folded napkin in the other. Steam curls up from the tea, pale and fragrant, and my stomach rolls before he comes close enough to set it down. “You need to hydrate. Dr. Mercer was very clear about recovery fluids after an interrupted heat response.”

I look at Sloane’s glass instead of the cup in Garrett’s hand. The water is close enough that I could reach it without moving toward him. The tea smells like chamomile and something sweet, but under that, it smells like being watched.

“I have water,” I say. My voice comes out soft, but the words are whole.

Garrett glances at the glass beside me, then back at my face. “Water is a start. This will help with the tremors.” He sets the tea on the low table, not in front of me exactly, just close enough that refusing it becomes something I have to keep doing. “You’ve had a difficult day. Everyone has.”

My fingers tighten in Callie’s sweater. My skin remembers his phone in my hand, my name at the top of messages I never sent. I remember Callie answering something she thought came from me. I remember I’m not supposed to say that in this room, not while he doesn’t know we know.

Garrett sits in the chair across from me, his body arranged into comfort. He doesn’t crowd. That makes it worse. He knows how to be near enough to take up space and far enough that fear looks unreasonable.

“Staying on the floor won’t bring her back,” he says, and the gentleness cuts so cleanly that I don’t know I’m bleeding until my throat closes. “Neither will refusing care.”

I stare at the tea because I can’t look at his eyes. If I look at his eyes, I’ll remember the messages, and if I remember the messages too hard, I’ll say something I’m not supposed to say. My thumb rubs over a loose thread in Callie’s sweater until the wool burns my skin.

“She didn’t leave me,” I whisper.

Garrett sighs through his nose. “I know it may feel that way.”

My head snaps up despite myself. The room brightens until every pale square of sun on the floor looks sharp enough to cut. “No. She didn’t.”

“Theo, Omegas often attach very deeply to the first person who provides softness during a transition. That doesn’t make the attachment false, but it does make it complicated.” He leans forward, elbows resting on his knees, voice dropping into the careful head-Alpha register that makes the air harder to breathe. “Calliope was part of your transition into this pack. She was kind to you. She gave you comfort when the Alphas were still learning your needs. But kindness and long-term capacity are different things.”

My hands start shaking. It begins in my wrists, then moves up my arms until the sweater trembles against my mouth. I want Sloane’s water. I want Idris’ hand at the back of my neck. I want Callie on the bathroom floor with me, her shoulder warm against the cabinet, telling me I don’t have to be brave in every room. My body knows the shape of that wanting so clearly it feels like a wound with a name.

“She’s mine,” I say. The words scrape on the way out, but I get them out. “I wanted her.”

Garrett’s face softens in a way that makes my stomach turn. “Wanting someone doesn’t mean they can stay where they’re harming the structure.”

“She didn’t harm me.”

“You don’t know what harmed you yet.” Garrett’s voice is still calm, still patient, still terrible. “Your heat was interrupted. Your recovery is unstable. Your body is trying to turn abandonment into loyalty because the alternative is painful.”

“She didn’t abandon me,” I say, and this time the words are louder. My breath comes too fast. The room starts to tilt around the edges, but I keep my eyes on him because if I look away, he’ll put his version of the truth where mine belongs. “You can’t make me think that.”

Garrett’s expression changes so slightly that I almost miss it. The softness thins. Something colder looks through.