“Caleb!”

I cried his name over and over, but he didn’t come back. I tried to climb down from Ryan’s arms, but my legs were like jelly. My whole body felt numb, as though I were no longer inhabiting it.

“Caleb, come back!”

Ryan gripped me tight against his chest. “Shhh,” he said, stroking my hair. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay. Caleb’s gone. He’s left me here. Why did he leave me?”

Ryan’s face looked stricken. He knew, of course. Caleb had said something, and Ryan had heard it with his shifter telepathy.

“Where is he?” I pounded my fists against Ryan’s bare chest, but he only shook his head, his eyes sad.

“He’s gone.”

It was the woman. She stood next to Ryan, gazing down at me with familiar blue eyes, Caleb’s eyes. I knew I was looking at Maria, Caleb’s mother.

She stroked my cheek, and the gesture made me so sick for my own family, for unconditional love, for the love I thought I could get from Caleb. Hot tears streaked down my cheeks.

“Why did he leave me?”

“Oh, honey.” She swept her arm around the clearing. “Can you blame him?”

“I don’t understand.”

“He’s a wolf. His first instinct is always to protect the people he loves. That puts you at the number one spot. Right now, he’s a newly crowned alpha who just had to fight his way to dominance.” She gestured to the carnage strewn across the clearing. “He’s left a trail of destruction in his wake. If he thinks that is the only life he can give you, then he believes you deserve something more, more than him.”

“I don’t want more than him, whatever that means. I just want him.”

“He’ll figure that out, love. But he has to do that in his own time, in his own way. He’s just won the right to his freedom. I think he wants the same for you.”

Freedom. Caleb had spoken about it before, how he’d never felt as though he had it under the reign of his stepfather, how he admired me for renting my little cabin and forging my own freedom from the ashes of my tragedy. Why, then, did he not feel we could be free together? I just couldn’t understand.

“We have to go after him,” I said to Ryan.

“Rosa.” Ryan’s arms tightened around me. “Come on now. We’ll take you home.”

“But Caleb—”

Ryan shook his head. “He doesn’t want to be found. He wants you to go back to Crookshollow and write your book and live your life and forget you ever met him.”

“But how? How can I just pretend he never existed? All my life, I’d had to be my own hero, until I met him. Caleb saved me. He saved me from everything, especially from myself. I was going to drown in anger and revenge, but he stopped me. He made me see that I could do more.”

“He feels like he let you down,” Ryan said, as he started to walk back through the forest, Marcus and another tall, naked guy with long black hair followed behind him. “He needs to find a way to make it up to you.”

“But I forgive him, I forgive you, Caleb!” I wailed as they opened a car door and bundled me inside.

There was no answer from the forest. Ryan shut the door. Marcus slid into the seat next to me and buckled my seatbelt. The engine roared to life. I sat, numb with pain as we pulled away and bumped along the forest road, staring out the window at the trees rolling away into the distance, leaving my heart behind me.

* * *

Everything was fine after that night, except that it wasn’t.

Ryan took me straight to a hospital in Aberdeen, and had my wounds dressed. Caleb’s saliva must have done wonders for my healing abilities, because by the time the doctors got to me, the wound barely even needed stitches.

We made it back to Crookshollow without incident. I can’t even recall the drive back. I spent the entire trip thinking about Caleb, begging the universe to send him back to me. I didn’t care anymore about what he’d said. People said stupid stuff all the time they don’t mean. I weighed him by his actions. He’d waded into hell to save me. He’d defeated his powerful family to secure my freedom. That was what really mattered. Why couldn’t he see that?

Back in Crookshollow, I returned to my cabin. Margaret had already hired someone to scrub off the graffiti. All my stuff was there, exactly as I’d left it. I stared at a blob of dried egg stuck to the wall, a remnant of one of Caleb’s breakfast disasters, and cried for hours.

Ryan went back to his big house, and Marcus went back to his flat. I didn’t seek them out, and they didn’t try to stay in touch. I don’t think they knew what to say to me.

Alex came to check on me every other day, her clothes stained with bright paint splotches. We sipped tea on the porch while she kept up a steady stream of chatter about all sorts of things. I barely said a word to her, and she didn’t ask me to. I appreciated that, and came to look forward to her visits – the one bright spot in the black hole of my pain.

Every day, my laptop stared at me from the desk under the window, but I ignored it. Instead, I read book after depressing, heartbreaking book, watched reality TV shows on the tiny screen of my phone, and cried my way through fifty-one boxes of Coles tissues.

A week after we returned to Crookshollow, there was a knock on my cabin door. I wasn’t expecting Alex, so I peered cautiously out the window. Luke stood on the porch, his face impassive, his hands jammed into his pockets. For the first time ever, he looked uncomfortable.

I threw opened the door. “Have you seen him?” I demanded.

Luke shook his head. “Is that any way to greet your second-favourite werewolf? How’s the book going?”

“It’s not, and you know that it’s not. Answer my question, have you seen Caleb?”

Luke looked even more uncomfortable. “He doesn’t want to be found right now. He said there was something he had to do. Can I come in?”

I held open the door for him. Luke slumped down in the chintz chair, and I put on the kettle for both of us.

“I thought you might like to know that the Macleans have agreed to leave you alone,” he said. “Maria got Douglas and Irvine to sit down and make a truce. Douglas has even agreed to support us when we reveal the existence of shifters to the world.”

“So he knows about the ring?”

Luke nodded. “Maria explained it to him again, and he agrees that a lot of good could come from having the shifter society out in the open. He’s a changed man since the battle. He can’t abide what Angus did, what he nearly supported. I think Douglas sees that his legacy will be one of cruelty and cowardice, and he can’t abide that.”

“Good for him,” I said flatly, pouring out the tea and handling Luke his cup. Without Caleb, all of this seemed pointless.

Luke beamed as he took a sip. ”And there’s more. Robbie has asked to join our pack.”

Now that was a surprise. “And you let him?”

Luke nodded. “He showed he can stand up for what is right, that when the time comes, we can count on him. He wants to help us find the ring, and honestly, with Caleb gone, I could really use the help.”

“Could you track Caleb down, if you had to?” I tried to keep my tone casual, but my voice was thick with hope.

Luke looked away, as though he didn’t want to answer. He was silent for several moments, before saying, “If it was life or death, yeah. I could find him.”

“This is life or death, Luke. I need him.”

“You don’t, though.” Luke looked around the cabin. “A couple of weeks ago, all this was enough for you.”

“That was before I knew him.” My throat closed. “We had a fight, before I was kidnapped. It was a shitty fight, but I don’t understand why we can’t just sit down and talk about it.”

“From what he told me, you can’t do that because he knows he was wrong. And he’s not very good at saying sorry. He has to find a way to show you.”

“Can’t you do something? You’re the closest family he’s got.”

Luke shook his head. “This is Caleb’s thing. You know as well as I do that he’s a stubborn git. Nothing I could say will convince him of something if he doesn’t believe it himself.”

I stared at the laptop, lying untouched on my desk, a layer of dust across the lid. “I don’t know how to go on without him.”

“You do what you have to do, Rosa. You use the freedom he won for you, and you do the thing you’re supposed to do – you write your book, and tell your story.”

I wiped a tear from my eye. “Before I met Caleb, I never thought I’d get the chance for a happy ending. I was positive my life was just going to be one struggle to be accepted after the next. But he showed me that I had so much more to live for than that. He made me feel like I could do anything. He could’ve been my happy ending, if I hadn’t messed it all up.”

Luke shrugged. “You didn’t mess up, he did, and that’s what he’s trying to fix. Maybe there’s no happy ending because it isn’t time for the ending yet.”

How I wished that was the truth. But I had to face facts. Caleb had run away. He didn’t want me to contact him. He was gone from my life for good. I had to find a way to get over him and move on with my life.