Page 77 of Saddle and Scent
I guess that includes the three men in this room who convinced themselves that hurting me was somehow protecting me.
"We acknowledge what we did wrong," Callum speaks up, and there's something careful in his voice, like he's trying to navigate a minefield without setting off any explosives.
Acknowledge.
Such a careful, diplomatic word.
A clinical way to discuss the wholesale destruction of four young hearts.
"What is it that you did wrong to chase her away then?" the doctor counters immediately, not giving him any room to hide behind vague admissions and generalized guilt.
The silence that follows is deafening.
I can feel the weight of unspoken truth pressing down on all of us, the thing that's been sitting in this room like a bomb waiting to detonate.
The real reason they pushed me away.
The thing I've spent ten years trying to figure out, trying to understand, trying to make sense of in the context of everything I thought I knew about them and us and love.
Callum holds his tongue, apparently unable or unwilling to voice whatever truth he's carrying.
But then Beckett's voice cuts through the silence, barely above a whisper but carrying the weight of a decade's worth of regret.
"It was for her own good."
For my own good.
Because surely that's what they told themselves.
They found a way to make their decision noble instead of cowardly.
Of course they convinced themselves that breaking my heart was somehow an act of love instead of an act of fear.
"If it was for her own good," the doctor asks, her voice deadly quiet, "would you all be this miserable ten years later?"
The question hangs in the air like an indictment.
Because they are miserable.
I can hear it in their voices, see it in the way they move around each other, smell it in the undercurrent of regret that clings to their scents like smoke. They've been carrying this for a decade, just like I have. The weight of what could have been, what should have been, what they destroyed in the name of protecting.
"Would an Omega be doing hard labor on the brink of a heat wave on a sanctuary ranch all by herself, with not a single Alpha to aid her?" the doctor continues, building momentum. "Would this town be gossiping about the new and only Omega in town who's unmated, saying it's only a matter of time for some pack to swoop in and deflower her?"
My stomach clenches at her words.
I know that's exactly what's happening.
I've felt the eyes on me, heard the whispered conversations that stop when I walk into a room. The calculating looks from Alphas who view me as a challenge to be conquered rather than a person to be cherished. Felt the weight of being the only unmated Omega in a town full of people who think they have opinions about what I should do with my life.
"How do you know all of this?" Wes asks, and there's genuine curiosity beneath the defensiveness in his voice.
The doctor huffs, and I can hear her shifting, probably crossing her arms or adjusting her position in that particular way medical professionals do when they're about to deliver uncomfortable truths.
"I have to know about all of these things because that's my job," she says. "To help Omegas wake up and smell the coffee and stop wasting their lives on Alphas who are either too chicken to man up and claim the Omega they love, or too selfish to let her go find someone who will."
The bluntness is refreshing.
And terrifying.
