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I spent the rest of the drive trying to figure out the logistics of getting another cheap apartment, of moving out of the house, changing my address, having to tell my coworkers and my twin and Hart—who was going to absolutely kill me…

The car stopped in the Howard Johnson parking lot, and I forced myself to get out, trying to hold it together.

Because I loved Elliot Crane.

But there was no way after all this that he would still love me.

He followed me up the stairs in silence, and it felt like my legs were made of lead. Achy lead.

I walked into our room, Elliot right behind me. I heard the door click shut, but I didn’t know if I could face him, so I kept moving. Except there wasn’t very far for me to go.

“Seth.”

I stopped by the end of the bed, beside the desk with its weirdly ergonomic chair.

“Can I touch you?” he asked me, softly, and the fact that he felt he had to ask broke open my chest. Weirdly, it was like I’d run out of tears, and my eyes remained dry, even though I’d lost the ability to speak or even breathe.

So I just nodded.

A warm palm settled on my lower back. Then Elliot walked around to my side, his hand sliding to my hip. With his other hand, he reached out and pulled my other arm away from my chest, then drew me into a hug.

I tried to resist for a half-second, but I wanted him to hold me too much, and I essentially collapsed into his arms. He pulled me closer, sitting on the bed behind him and drawing me with him, cradling my head and shoulders against his chest.

The tears did come, then.

He held me for several minutes, rocking gently. “Baby, I don’t know what’s going on in that head of yours, but it’s not right.”

“I-if you d-don’t know, then h-how d-do you know?” I wasn’t terribly coherent, but it was the best I could manage.

“Are you thinking how much I love you?”

I shook my head against his chest.

“Are you thinking that I’m going to be here with you for all of this, as long as it takes, however hard or ugly it is, no matter what?”

I shook my head again.

“Are you thinking that I will love you tomorrow and the next day and the next, no matter what your parents did or didn’t do, no matter how fucked up your past is, whether your father killed your mother or not?”

Now I was crying too hard to shake my head.

“How about that I’m going to hold you until you believe me, and I will do it again tomorrow, no matter how many times you shy away from me, because I do love you, and I trust that you love me, even if you can’t say it right now?”

I clung to him, shamed and humbled and utterly destroyed.

One hand stroked through my hair as he continued. “Seth, there is nothing, I repeat, nothing , that will make me stop loving you. Not your father, not your fucked up religious background, not even your death or mine. I love you. Now and always. Got it?”

I mumble-sobbed a “Love you” into his now-damp shirt.

I don’t know how long we stayed there, but his stomach growled loudly next to my ear, causing me to pull away.

“You’re hungry,” I said softly.

He reached out and brushed tears and a few too-long blond hairs from my face. “Will you eat if I bring back sandwiches? For me?”

I nodded, rubbing at my eyes, even though I didn’t at all feel like eating. I knew that wasn’t going to change, but I’d at least try to eat some of what he brought back. I pushed away from him, half crawling my way up the bed, then laid on my side, curled up around my hurt and humiliation.

I hadn’t expected to fall asleep.

Yes, I was exhausted, but I was also riddled with fear and anxiety and something that might have been grief, although I couldn’t quite figure out what I was grieving for.

I remember hearing the door click as Elliot left, and then swimming back out of darkness as Elliot’s gentle hands smoothed over my forehead.

“Baby, wake up.”

I made some sort of noise.

“Come on, Seth. You need to eat.”

I peeled my eyes open, hating the stickiness of my contact lenses. I rubbed at them.

I felt Elliot stand, and when he returned, he had my glasses. “Take them out,” he said gently, then held out one hand for me to put the disposable lenses in.

I obeyed, my eyes at least feeling a little less irritated once I had my glasses on, although I could feel a headache starting already, and they wouldn’t help with that.

Elliot set a brown box in front of me, and I opened it to find some sort of pita sandwich, a salad, and pile of potato chips.

He passed me a plastic fork for the salad.

Then he brought over a plastic cup full of some kind of juice and the bottle of Bayer.

“You should take at least one now,” he said gently.

I nodded obediently and took the pill with a swallow of juice. It was tart and sweet, something a little tropical—maybe pineapple—and citrus and the seedy tartness of raspberry. I took another sip, testing how much my stomach was willing to tolerate.

The juice seemed okay.

I wasn’t sure about either the sandwich, which Elliot said was chicken salad, or the chips. My mouth and throat felt dry and raw, and the idea of putting anything solid in them was daunting.

“Try to eat something?” Elliot said, his tone gentle and pleading.

I smothered a sigh, then picked up a chip and put it in my mouth, the salt and potato sticking to my tongue. It was hard to chew and force myself to swallow.

“You need to eat, baby.”

In that moment, it felt like the story of our relationship. It was one of the first things he’d said to me after I’d gotten out of the hospital, what he’d done for me the first day I’d arrived in Shawano, what he’d done the day he decided he really did want to date me.

What he did every time I had to work long hours at a crime or fire scene, or just after a long weekend of training when the copious quantities of food they’d fed us—because most of us were shifters or other Nids—still weren’t enough to fully satisfy a shifter’s metabolism.

He wasn’t wrong—he’d been right about every one of those meals—but I didn’t know if I could actually follow his good advice. Swallowing one potato chip had been an effort.

I picked a single mayonnaise-covered chunk of chicken out of the pita pocket and put it in my mouth. It was easier to eat than the potato chip, less dry and softer, but it still felt like swallowing a rock, and I grimaced.

“I know what it’s like,” Elliot said softly.

He was sitting on the end of the bed, one leg tucked up under him, the other hanging off the end.

He had a sandwich that looked like it was made of roast beef, and I could smell sauerkraut.

“Not—not specifically, of course,” he continued, color staining the copper skin of his cheeks.

“But grief. I get it. It’s… weird and irrational.

It does the most fucked up shit to you. One minute you feel like screaming, the next you’re so angry you want to strangle literally everyone within arm’s reach, and then you find yourself sobbing uncontrollably. ”

I stared down at the sandwich in front of me.

He wasn’t wrong—I had felt those things.

Anger, frustration, helplessness, sorrow.

They were part of grieving. But they were things I didn’t have a right to.

Elliot did—his father had been a good man.

A loving man. Someone he’d loved who had been taken away from him.

I didn’t.

My mother had kept Noah and me alive until the age of fifteen, but that was about the extent of what I was grateful for. And my father was apparently a murderer.

“I—I didn’t love her,” I said, finally.

Elliot paused mid-chew, then finished quickly, swallowing the bite. He opened his mouth, then closed it. He clearly didn’t know what to say to that.

I’d thought more than once about the fact that it was because I’d never really loved either of my parents that I’d made so many bad relationship decisions.

I’d thought I loved the men I’d dated, the men I’d lived with.

But I hadn’t, not really. I’d compromised and changed my behavior and did things to bring them pleasure, and I’d liked it when they’d praised me, bought me gifts, did things for and to me that showed they were pleased with me.

But I hadn’t known—couldn’t have known—what it was like to actually love and be loved.

That wasn’t entirely true.

I loved Noah. And Noah loved me. But that was almost an obligation. Part of our genetics in a way that we couldn’t deny, even if we’d wanted to. We’d shared everything . You can’t help but love your twin.

People said that about parents and children, too, of course. But in my family that clearly hadn’t been the case. Maybe Momma had thought she loved us. But she’d clearly loved what she wanted us to be more than who we really were.

But Elliot…

Elliot loved me .

Whether he still would in another week or two, I didn’t know.

“She was your mother ,” Elliot said, studying me.

I nodded. “She was,” I agreed.

“And you didn’t love her,” he said, as though the idea were confusing.

I picked a cherry tomato out of the salad and ate it so that I didn’t have to look up and see his face—see the judgment on his features. “She didn’t love me—or Noah—either,” I mumbled. “Not really.”

“Was she…” He didn’t finish the question.

“No,” I replied. “Not directly. But she didn’t stop my father, either. Or the other Community Elders. She loved the children she wanted us to be, but not the children she actually had. Not us .”

Elliot was silent, and I didn’t know what he was thinking. I couldn’t make myself look up, in case it was what I feared.

“Did you ever?” he asked, then, and the question was soft and almost pained.

“I think so,” I replied softly. I had memories of proudly showing things to my mother when I was very young—drawings or crafts or copied prayers or something.

Wanting her to be proud of me. Memories of hiding behind her skirts when my father was particularly angry or when some of the Community Elders would come, their voices loud and harsh, their hands rough and unkind.

But it was blurred by time and the fleeting nature of childhood memories.

Because I also remembered bitterness and the horrified realization that Momma wasn’t going to save us.

Wasn’t going to stop my father from dragging me into the basement cellar.

Wasn’t going to keep the Elders my father had brought into the house for this very purpose from using pain and humiliation to convince me to choose a path that I had no ability to choose.

I remembered the cold and dark of the basement, the gnawing hunger in my belly from days with nothing but water, the ache in my body from kneeling on the floor, the sting left by a belt on my skin.

The sharp, deep pain left from when they’d tried to convince me I wasn’t gay. The pain that had been both physical and emotional. Soul-deep.

By the time they’d packed Noah and I off to conversion camp, all I had left was derision and disappointment.

By the time I walked out of the house, headed for the hospital where the ambulance had taken Noah, it had become hatred.

By the time I’d met Elliot, it had simmered to pity and disgust.

Now, it all came back. At once. Putting me through the emotional wringer so that I could barely remember who I was. All I had left was the shattered shell of what they’d wanted me to be—what I hadn’t failed to become, because I hadn’t even really tried.

“You can grieve for what you never had, you know,” Elliot murmured, and his voice was so tender I couldn’t help but look up.

And all I found in the fractured crystal of his hazel eyes was love.