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"Neither do I. But you asked whether I thought she would sell you, and I told you yes." He drew a slow breath. "I've spent the day reconsidering that answer."

My fingers tightened around the phone. "What's the new one?"

"I don't know."

I waited, but Alex didn't try to soften it.

"That isn't comfort, kiddo. I'm not asking you to trust her, and I'm not telling you what her hesitation means. I'm telling you I was certain before, and now I'm not. You've had enough people deciding what's true for you this week."

After we hung up, I stayed on the edge of the bed with the phone between both hands and the sheet pooled around my waist.

Alex hadn't defended Danika. That almost would have been easier. He had simply taken something I thought I knew and put a question mark where the period used to be.

Eventually, I turned around.

River sat against the headboard with the sheet across his hips and his hands resting open beside him. During the call, frost had returned to the bottom corner of the window, spreading in delicate white veins across the glass.

So much for relaxed.

"You heard all of it."

"Yes."

I set the phone beside me. "You never told Alex about your fling, huh."

"No."

"Seriously, River."

His gaze stayed on mine. "I told myself the pack had enough to worry about. Then I told myself Leviathan might have been lying. After enough time passed, I told myself bringing it up would make it look as though I'd deliberately hidden what I suspected." His jaw tightened. "By then, I was too deep in it to fix."

I waited.

River looked toward the frost spreading across the window. "Every one of those things was a reason. None of them was the truth."

"Then what is the truth?"

His attention returned to me. "That I decided what Alex needed to know without giving him any say in it." His eyes dropped briefly to his hands. "A nine-year-old child is wearing a bandage because of a decision I made for him."

I looked at River. At the shadows beneath his eyes with frost steadily consuming the motel window on the other side of us.

Then I thought about my mother writing I chose in a letter she could never know I would find. Danika deciding which truths I was allowed to grow up with. For their own good. For protection. Because somebody else knew better.

"Okay."

River's eyes narrowed slightly. "Okay?"

"You're going to tell him yourself." I stood and started gathering clothes that had been distributed around the room with considerably more optimism than I currently felt. "Not tonight. When we go back, you're going to sit down with him and tell him everything you told me, including the part where you apologize. And I'm not doing it for you." I found my underwear under the bed.

River watched me for a long moment. "That's the whole punishment? You're not going to help?"

The question should have annoyed me. Instead my fingers tightened around the panties.

Of course he thought it was punishment. Something clean would have been easier. Anger, a fight, Alex throwing him out. River could take any of those, absorb the damage, and call the debt paid.

Sitting across from Alex and handing him the truth without controlling what happened afterward was something else entirely.

I crossed back toward the bed. "River, this isn't a punishment."