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The cabin.

I slowed as I approached it. I moved through the last hundred yards in the low, silent crouch of an animal that was no longer running from something but toward it. The cabin was dark and locked and had been empty since Nell left it days ago.

The wolf nosed the door open and went inside.

The main room was cold and still. The wolf moved through it without interest, past the kitchen where her coffee cup had been washed and left on the drying rack, past the desk where she had sat, and into the bedroom.

The wolf went to the chair. It pressed its nose into the seat of the fabric and inhaled, searching for any remnant of her scent. It was gone. There was nothing of her left. Because she was in the city, thriving.

She was thriving while I was starving myself, preparing for the day I'd eat wedding cake and it would likely get lodged in my throat. I hadn't had a chance to get my fill of her, but she was apparently done with me.

Well, fuck that. I still had ten days before I made a commitment. If I was getting fucked over, I'd at least get fucked for my efforts.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

NELL

Addie's apartment smelled like Mei Ling's cooking. The scents hit me in the hallway, rich and warm and coming apart into their components the way a chord came apart into individual notes when a jazz musician broke it down. Ginger first, sharp and bright. Then garlic underneath it, softer like it had been cooking long enough to lose its bite and become something sweeter; a dark licorice note that meant something had been braising for hours.

"Your place smells like star anise."

Addie looked at me. Then, at the kitchen. Then back at me. "Mei Ling dropped off food last night. How did you…" She cocked her head and gazed at me like she was seeing me anew.

I shrugged, moving past her to take up one of the bar seats. "I've always had a good sense of smell. It runs in the family. What did she make?"

"Red-braised short ribs. With five spice."

"That's what the star anise is part of."

I looked around the spacious apartment. Half of it was Addie's careful, curated aesthetic. The other half was the aggressive masculinity of a man who had apparently never owned a throw pillow before and was learning to coexist with them.

"He tried to throw out the velvet one," Addie said, handing me a glass of wine and tucking her feet under herself on the couch. "The teal one with the fringe. I found it in the hallway outside the recycling room."

"He put it in recycling?"

"He didn't know what else to do with it. He's never owned a decorative pillow before. I put it back on the couch. He hasn't touched it since. We've reached a détente."

"A throw pillow détente. The foundation of every strong marriage."

"Don't laugh. We also had a significant negotiation about the thread count of the sheets."

"Who won?"

"I did. Obviously."

Addie reached forward and pulled the lid off one of the containers. I helped myself to the short ribs and ate them with my fingers. Outside, the city did its nighttime thing beyond Addie's floor-to-ceiling windows, indifferent and glittering.

This was what we had always done. Cheap wine in Brooklyn had become expensive wine on the Upper East Side. Mei Ling's leftovers had replaced the Thai takeout we used to split. There were wolves in the hallway instead of the neighbor's aggressive Labrador. The essential thing was unchanged: two women, talking about everything, held together by the gravity of a friendship that had survived enough that it no longer needed to prove itself.

I missed this more than I had admitted to myself.

"Tell me something I don't know," I said.

Addie considered this with the gravity it deserved. "Vidar is a complete freak between the sheets."

I inhaled wine. "Addie⁠—"

"You asked for something you didn't know." She was entirely unrepentant. "I'm just saying. The man applies himself. Thoroughly." A pause. "Multiple times."