You Are Not Rejecting Me novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: What Idris Saw

Idris's POV

A man on his phone at the next table, the bartender had said.

I knew four men in Ember Ridge who sat with a phone in their hand all night.

Three of them were over sixty.

The fourth was Owain Blythe, who had been my brother's Beta for six years and his best friend for twenty.

I did not want it to be him.

I sat in the truck outside the Antler with the engine off and made myself think it through.

Owain had been in the Antler most Tuesdays since he was twenty-one.

That did not make him the man on the phone.

It made him a man who would have been there anyway.

I called the pack's patrol desk and asked who had the north ridge on Tuesday night.

The kid on the line said, "Owain, I think. Hang on."

He came back a minute later.

"No, sorry. Nobody logged the north ridge Tuesday. He swapped it out. He said he had a thing in town."

I thanked him and hung up.

I had dropped Nia at the lodge an hour before.

She had gone up the steps with her chin up and her hands in fists, and said she needed to think.

I let her go.

I had spent two years learning to let her go.

She came to the dinner table every night with her eyes on her plate.

She never touched the plates I left outside her door, and she never asked me why.

I had asked myself why a hundred times.

The answer was the night of the Moon Run.

I had been standing at the east treeline with a she-wolf from the Pinewood pack at my shoulder.

She had asked me to run with her.

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