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view. While they spoke in hushed voices, Taylor laid down in bed. She grabbed a pillow to hold and turned her back to the door. Eyes squeezed shut, she silently begged Hale to make Alder go away. She wasn’t ready to talk to him.
    But somehow, as the door shut and she heard footsteps approaching the pallet, Taylor knew that Hale was gone. She closed her eyes, stubbornly refusing to greet her mate.
    Alder sat down next to her. He placed a hand on her shoulder and began to massage with the ball of his thumb, hitting all the right spots. She bit down on her bottom lip to keep from moaning.
    Quietly, he said, “I didn’t know how to tell you.”
    Bitter tears pricked at her eyes. “You could have told me when you told me about Dawn. ‘Oh, and by the way, the baby didn’t die. She’s twelve-years-old and could show up at any time.’ See, easy?”
    Alder turned her so that she lay on her back. He cupped her head in his hands, forcing her to look up at him.
    “I’m sorry. It wasn’t fair and I won’t ever keep anything from you again.”
    As she started to cry, Taylor allowed Alder to pull her into his arms and hold her. She wasn’t giving in. She was just too exhausted to fight.
    Alder rocked her back and forth in a slow, comforting motion. As he did, he told her everything. How Dawn had died a few hours after giving birth and how Snow was terribly premature.
    “Dawn was dead, and when they told us that Snow wouldn’t make it through the night, I lost it.”
    Alder had left for nearly a week. He had made peace with their deaths, as best he could, but when he came back to find that Snow was still clinging to life, he found himself in an even worse situation than before.
    Snow never really got any better— he just stayed sick. She never shifted, rarely held down food, and many nights, she would stop breathing and need to be resuscitated. They had thought it was only a matter of time before she died.
    “Hale continued to claim that she was his, and I let him. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done and I can’t make any excuses for it.”
    Taylor put her anger aside for a few moments and placed a cool hand on the back of his neck.
    “Alder, you were fifteen—”
    “Sixteen, then.”
    “That doesn’t matter. I knew a lot of adults who couldn’t handle having a sick kid. You were still a kid yourself.”
    She had no memories of the Cavanaughs, the husband and wife who had adopted her as a newborn. From what her mother had later told her, Mr. Cavanaugh had been a lawyer and his wife had quit her job as a college professor to stay home and raise Taylor full-time. For all intents and purposes, they had been ideal parents, but even they hadn’t been able to handle a baby that could go into heart failure at any moment.
    “She was still my daughter,” Alder said, shaking his head. “And she terrified me. I didn’t want to look at her, I didn’t want to hear her, I didn’t want to smell her…I forced myself to stay there in my brother’s pack, but it wasn’t so that I could be by her side. I was punishing myself.”
    Alder told her how he went on like that for three years. The pack females and his older brother Cain took on most of the responsibility of Snow, and as the years passed, she only became marginally healthier.
    “She never spoke, never cried. She just coughed and wheezed all the time and there was nothing any of us could do. Then, Sarah came.”
    His brother Cain took a second mate, one who just happened to have medical training. Sarah was familiar with Snow’s medical problems and how to treat them. Under her care, Snow’s health had improved drastically. She’d even started talking.
    Before long, Sarah had uncovered the truth of Snow’s parentage and she convinced Alder to be honest with Cain and take responsibility for his daughter. Cain hadn’t taken the news well, but with Sarah helping to smooth things over, they had managed to maintain a civil relationship.
    “Snow was four when I told