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The silence that followed was not empty. It was alive. Charged with everything unsaid and unraveling. Around them, the distant sound of hammering continued. Voices echoed from the tree line where volunteers rebuilt fence posts. But in that small space between them, the world was still .

Natalie’s lips trembled. She was shaking now, not from cold, but from the sheer toll of disappointment. Of anger that had nowhere to land. Her chest rose and fell with rapid breaths as though her body couldn’t contain it all.

“I need time,” she said at last. “To figure it out.”

Mason wanted to reach for her, to take her hands, to promise her it would be okay. But he didn’t. He simply nodded, his eyes hollowing just slightly at the edges.

From a distance, Olivia watched them. She sat on the edge of the gathering tent, an untouched mug of coffee cooling in her hands.

Her eyes followed her son as he worked beside the volunteers, his expression focused, his words minimal.

She hadn’t spoken to him since the fire, not truly, and the guilt of it gnawed at her.

She looked back at Natalie and Mason, their standoff unfolding like a scene in slow motion. It was her secret that had unraveled them. Her choice. Her silence. She thought she had been protecting her son. Protecting Mason. Even Natalie.

But she hadn’t protected anyone. She’d detonated a truth too large to bury.

Natalie walked away from Mason like the wind moving through burned trees, silent but devastating. As she turned, she caught Olivia’s gaze. They held it for a breath too long. Olivia stood to go to her, but Natalie turned sharply and disappeared into the shade of the trees before she could.

Natalie walked without thinking, her boots crunching through charred needles, her vision blurring. The trees rose tall and indifferent around her. It was happening again. That slow, painful unraveling .

She remembered the night she discovered Giles’ affair. That night, she’d gone to bed alone, the house she had built her life in cold and empty. And now, she felt that same sensation settling into her chest.

She had believed in Mason. Believed in a future.

In healing. In something that could finally be hers, without compromise.

Now even that had been tainted. The fire hadn’t taken her home.

But maybe it had taken something else. Something she feared she wouldn’t find again.

The truth. The kind that you can build a life on.

She found a bench at the edge of the lower trail and sat. Her hands covered her face. Her shoulders shook as she sobbed. Maybe it was from exhaustion or disappointment, she didn’t know but let it out anyway.

The sun continued its descent over the scorched fields.

Somewhere nearby, a volunteer laughed, brief and too loud, then silence.

A bird called once, twice. And then nothing but wind.

The sanctuary would be rebuilt plank by plank, post by post. But some things would take longer to restore, and some may never be whole again. Davey and Olivia. Her and Mason.

Natalie turned her face toward upwards, closing her eyes for a moment and let herself feel it: the hope, the hesitation, the disappointment.

All of it. But it didn’t vanish. It clung to her ribs like smoke.

She opened her eyes and looked again at Mason, who now chatted quietly with a local wildlife officer by the refreshment table.

From a distance, he looked like any other man.

A little older, a little wearier, but with a steady kind of strength that drew people in.

She remembered the first time she’d seen him.

Back then, he was a mystery. Now he was a wound.

“I thought love was supposed to make us whole,” she murmured, not really intending for anyone to hear.

But Olivia, who had stepped up beside her unnoticed, did .

“It doesn’t,” Olivia said softly, her cane clicking as she adjusted her stance. “It breaks us apart. Then makes us decide what pieces are worth keeping.”

Natalie turned to her. “Do you regret not telling me? About Mason and Davey?”

Olivia exhaled slowly, watching the sky where a hawk circled high above. “Every day. But regret’s a backward thing. It doesn’t build. It destroys.”

“I just…” Natalie faltered. “I didn’t expect to feel so… let down.”

Olivia’s eyes sharpened. “Natalie. You’re exhausted.

And when you feel like that, everything is magnified a million times and I swear to you, that one drunken night, the years of omission are minuscule compared to what you and Mason have found here.

Please don’t let two maudlin people and a bottle of scotch get in the way of that. ”

“I don’t know how to look at him without feeling that way.”

A breeze picked up, rattling the strings of a handmade wind chime overhead. Olivia tapped her cane against the porch post thoughtfully.

“Mason’s not perfect,” she said. “But he’s here. Still trying to be the person he wants to be, for you more than anything. That counts for something, doesn’t it?”

Natalie’s gaze drifted toward Davey, who had just slipped away from the crowd and was now sitting alone on the stone wall that edged the sanctuary’s main pasture. His shoulders were rounded forward, head bowed slightly, like he was still figuring out how to hold all that he now knew.

“Mending things doesn’t mean forgetting,” Olivia added. “It just means we stop picking at the threads.”

Natalie gave a hollow laugh. “You’ve always had a way with words. ”

“Years of living in a place where the wild things don’t speak but still tell the truth.”

They remained in silence for a while as the sun dipped behind the tree line. The air cooled, tinged with pine and ash and something faintly floral, the new lavender bushes by the guest cabin. A sign perhaps.

Finally, Natalie said, “I’m glad the community showed up today.”

“They didn’t come for me,” Olivia said. “They came because we all gave them something to believe in again.”

Natalie shook her head. “Yes. We did that. Together.”

They turned then, slowly, back toward the crowd, where laughter rose like mist and music carried across the hills.

And behind them, the sanctuary stood, stitched together, scarred but breathing. Just like them.