Lydia’s POV
Something shifted, quietly, in the weeks that followed our dinner outside the pack borders, and I couldn’t quite pinpoint when it started.
A canceled evening here, a shorter text there, easy enough to excuse away as the demands of a man who ran half of Hopkins’ surgical wing.
I told myself it meant nothing. I’d gotten too used to good things lately, and maybe some old, self-protective instinct was simply looking for reasons to believe that he’d returned to factory settings—typical Xander.
He still left coffee on my desk most mornings, even though he never bothered to check if I'd drunk it like he used to…. But still I decided to overlook it, convincing myself not to expect too much from him–not when I knew our arrangement.
He still smiled at me across crowded rooms, even t
