Two months Later

Emma sat at her desk in the office she shared with Henry at the university in Pittsburgh.

Henry was preparing a lecture for a class he would be teaching that night, but Emma was using her office hours to finish up the final first draft of her dissertation. Her paper was a review on migratory patterns of black bears, but the final section was on future directions.

Emma stared at the wall in front of her. The wall had a mountain scene with wolves standing on a hillside. The picture always reminded Emma of falling off the boulder, which then led to thoughts of Aiden.

Her brain had a way of taking any random thought and circling it back around to Aiden, but this one was one of the most obvious triggers.

“Do you think some wolves really mate for life?” Henry asked.

Emma shrugged. “You’re the wolf expert.”

“The literature is mixed. It seems like the better our tracking systems get, the more we know, and the evidence is pointing less and less in that direction.”

“So you don’t think they do.”

“I think some do, but I think a lot of it depends on the circumstances.”

“Hm.” Emma typed a new heading. Shapeshifters.

Although it’s commonly accepted that bears are solitary creatures and do not mate for life, they may have favorite mates that they seek out year after year.

Yet for those who support the notion that shapeshifters exist, they also automatically accept the idea that shifters mate for life. Yet not all shifters mate for life. Some never find their mates.

Perhaps bears aren’t so different from humans. Maybe some bears don’t mate for life simply because they never located their fated mates. Maybe all that wandering around is just a bear’s way of searching for that special bear. Much like some humans who spend their whole lives searching for a soul mate.

Perhaps a soul mate is the same thing as a shifter’s fated mate.

Emma stopped typing and stared into space again. Had she found her soul mate?

Henry looked up from his reading. “Are you going to tell me what happened out there in Colorado?”

“There’s really nothing to tell.” There’s so much to tell, I wouldn’t know where to begin.

“When are you going back?”

“I’m not going back.”

Henry linked his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “That bad, huh?”

She smiled wistfully. “It wasn’t bad.”

“But nothing happened, and you aren’t going back.”

She began typing again. When a shifter finds his or her mate, is the shifter then compelled to be with that mate? Or is it optional?

“How do you think wolves find their mates? For those who mate for life?” She asked.

“Maybe it just happens. Like people. Or maybe like people, they’re drawn to each other. And since it’s all about fate, the things that we do, that we think we do randomly, are really just to bring us closer.”

Her fingers poised above the keyboard, she stared at the poster. She thought about her compulsion to visit the zoo as a teen as well as her inexplicable decision to be a wildlife biologist.

Did it really matter that Aiden could shift into a bear at will?

It didn’t change who he was as a man.

It didn’t change the way he felt about her.

Or how she felt about him.

She could spend the rest of her life searching for someone like Aiden, who couldn’t shift into a bear.

She could search, but in her heart she knew that she would never find another man like him – one that she loved with every fiber of her being.

She typed the final closing remarks of her paper and emailed it to her dissertation chair.

Done. She was overwhelmed by the feeling of completeness. Sure. There would be rounds of revisions, and it would next spring before she could graduate with her doctorate. But the hardest part was completed.

Her grades for the class she was teaching were in. Her coursework was complete.

She was free. Free to do whatever she wanted to do.

Her parents were spending the last two weeks of December in Italy, so she had no family obligations. A lot of people found that sad. In fact, Henry had invited her to spend the holidays with his oversized family.

Emma, though, preferred solitude.

Perhaps solitude that included Aiden.

“Are you sure you won’t come with me to Texas?”

Emma’s lips curved into a smile. “It’s really sweet of you to offer. Give your family my best. But I’ve got something to do.”