Page 85 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

“I’m not. The pack will follow my lead… most of them, anyway. Aaron has some supporters among the older generation, but not enough to force a real challenge.” I pause. “What I am worried about is you having to stand in front of them and defend yourself. You shouldn’t have to do that.”

“Maybe I want to.”

The words stir a strange echo, her voice in some future, saying the same thing about a different matter entirely, but I file the echo away for later.

“There’s something else,” she says. “A thing I haven’t told you.”

I go still.

“You asked me once. About the driving. About why my hands shake near car keys.” She’s not looking at me now, she’s looking at the fire, and her voice has gone quiet. Careful. “I didn’t answer.”

“You don’t have to…”

“I want to.” She takes a breath. “My parents died in a car accident. Six years ago.”

The words land like stones in still water.

“We were supposed to go to dinner together. A family thing… my dad’s birthday, the restaurant he liked.” Her voice is steady, but I can see her hands trembling. “They were driving to pick me up. I was running late… I’m always running late, it’s the ADHD, I can never keep track of time… and they were hurrying because they didn’t want to lose the reservation, and…”

She stops.

I don’t move. Don’t speak. Just wait.

“A truck ran a red light. Hit them on the driver’s side. My dad died on impact. My mom…” Her voice cracks. “My mom made it to the hospital. Long enough for me to get there. Long enough to say goodbye.”

Oh.

Oh, Fable.

Everything clicks into place. Every locked door I couldn’t understand, the white-knuckle rides, the pre-drive rituals, the terror that predated her own accident. It wasn’t just fear of cars. It was grief so profound that getting behind the wheel felt like tempting fate to take her too.

“The drive that day,” she continues, and now the tears are falling, tracking down her cheeks. “The day of my crash. I was going to visit their graves. It was the anniversary. I hadn’t been able to do it, hadn’t been able to drive there, since the funeral. But that year, I decided I was ready. I was going to finally face it.”

“And then the other car…”

“Hit me. Spun me off the road. And I woke up in the hospital thinking the universe was punishing me for trying.”

I’m across the space between us before I realize I’ve moved, gathering her into my arms, holding her while she cries. She fits against me like she was made for this, her face pressed to my chest, her hands fisting in my sweater, her whole body shaking with the grief she’s been carrying alone for six years.

“I’m sorry,” I murmur into her hair. “I’m so sorry.”

“I never told anyone. Not like this, though. Never the whole thing.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

She draws back to arm’s length, holding my shoulders, and her eyes are red-rimmed but fierce.

“Your turn.”

I should have known this was coming.

“The man at your crash window,” I say. “The one you thought was a hallucination. The one you called pretty.”

Her breath catches.

“That was me.”

Later, after the revelations, after the tears, after we’ve moved from the couch to my bed because the fire is dying and the room is cold, she lies beside me in the dark.