Page 117 of Knot Her Beta

“What?” he squawks. “Why?”

“You’re not sleeping on a separate floor from the rest of us.” She glares at him. “I didn’t put in that elevator so you could ignore half of your home.”

“Fine.” His hand on her jaw brings her closer. “Jared can have the guest room on the ground floor.”

“Hey!”

Leif claps me on the shoulder. “No more hogging our Alpha’s bed every night.”

“I’ve changed my mind about all of us living together.”

“Too late,” Grady, Emily, and Leif all chorus.

Over the rest of the week, we pack up Emily’s cottage, going through a decade of living in one place.

Every evening after work, we board the water taxi together, pick up another stack of empty boxes and dinner to-go, and tackle one room at a time.

Emily is methodical.

Borderline ruthless.

In the kitchen, each plate, each pot, each wooden spoon is sorted in seconds, destined to stay or go. Her cast-iron skillet lands in the keep pile without discussion. The mismatched mugs from the back of the cabinet end up in the donate box. The knives are wrapped in dish towels and sealed in a box labeled sharps in her block-letter handwriting.

“These are coming with us,” she says, holding up a set of copper pots that have to be twenty years old. The bottoms are blackened from a decade of gas burners, but they still shine around the edges from loving care.

“You sure?” Leif kneels by the pantry, sorting through spices with a system that involves three different colored sticky notes. “Grady’s kitchen is already stocked.”

“Grady’s pots have the structural integrity of an empty soda can.” Emily sets the copper pots in the keep box. “These have survived three moves, a kitchen fire, and the time Jared tried to cook ramen and boiled the water out of the pan.”

“I was distracted,” I say, folding a dish towel into a square that doesn’t stay square. “You were planting bulbs in the rain, and it was very revealing.”

In the living room, Grady moves through the space with a gentler touch. His hands pause on the bookshelf, on the framed photo of Emily and me standing in front of the Homestead last fall, on the carved wooden bird she made that sits on the windowsill gathering dust.

Each item is considered. Some go in the keep pile. Some get photographed with his phone before they go into the donate box, as if documenting a museum exhibit that’s about to close.

“The guest room furniture stays,” Emily announces on Wednesday night. She stands in the doorway of the room where Grady, Leif, and I have all taken turns at one point or another. “For Jared’s new room on the island.”

“I still haven’t agreed to this,” I pout. “Your bed is more comfortable.”

“And you can still sleep there some nights.” She rises onto her toes to kiss my jutting lower lip. “But you have to share.”

I gather her close. “How about you just get a bigger mattress so we can all sleep together?”

She chuckles. “I don’t think I built any of the bedrooms to support that. Besides, it’s good to have your own space.”

“I hate how reasonable you are.” I kiss my Mark on her neck. “But if it’s what my Alpha demands…”

“It won’t be every night.” And she draws my lips to hers in promise.

By Thursday, the cottage has that hollow, between-lives feeling. Boxes line the hallway. The walls are bare where photos used to hang. The kitchen counters are wiped clean, and the sink is empty. Only the living room set remains intact. We’re keeping the couch, armchair, side tables, and coffee table for the upstairs family room at the new cabin. Everything else is either packed, donated, or sitting on the curb waiting for pickup.

I find Emily standing in the empty kitchen, staring out the window at the raised beds she built by hand, the trellises heavy with vines she’s nurtured for years.

I step up behind her to rub her tight shoulders. “We should take clippings, so we can bring a piece of the cottage with us to our new place.”

She sniffles once. “Yeah. We should.”

She turns into my chest until all I can see is the crown of her head. I hold her there for a long moment, my hand stroking her back until her breathing evens out.