My Fiancé Chose Her So I Chose Myself Chapter 39
The next morning, I saw Brooke outside the hearing room.
She stood on the far side of the security line with only a thin file folder in her arms.
She saw me, too, but didn’t come over.
Three years ago, she would have pushed straight through my door. Now, from fifteen yards away, she only gave a small nod.
I neither answered nor objected to her testifying.
When the hearing began, Brooke took the witness seat.
“Is this statement signed by you?” the chair asked.
“Yes.”
“And are its contents true?”
“All of them.”
She did not say Jenna had fooled her. She did not mention Evan’s collapse.
“I knew the music box belonged to Natalie. She told me to my face. Travis had no right to say yes, but I took it anyway.”
Brooke clenched her fingers together.
“In our circle, if Jenna said she felt unwell, the person who refused her automatically became the bad one. I liked being on the side of the caretaker. It made me feel kind, and it meant I didn’t have to look at the person we were leaving behind.”
The Lakecrest representative asked, “Did the old rules force you to do that?”
“No.”
“Then why do the rules need to change?”
Brooke lifted her head.
“Because they gave us the easiest excuse.”
She pointed to her statement.
“After Natalie shut off her private link, not one of us went to the registry to confirm she was safe. When she left the pack, we only thought she was punishing us. But every time we took her things or made her carry more, we told ourselves it was about protecting a vulnerable member.”
“The rules didn’t make us bad. But they made it far too easy to describe our choices as duty.”
The room was silent.
Brooke’s voice started to shake.
“I’m not here to ask Natalie for forgiveness. She already made it clear she doesn’t want me to contact her. I’m only here to state plainly what I did.”
When she finished, she left by the other corridor.
She didn’t come near me, and she didn’t leave a note behind.
The Lakecrest representative argued that the revised framework might increase registry costs and asked to delay the vote.
A few packs that had been leaning toward approval began to hesitate.
The chair called a recess.
Marissa came over to me.
“They’re going to drag this out on cost.”
“Then split private care from public support in the accounting.”
We reworked the proposal.
Medication, temporary housing, and emergency transport would come from the pack’s public support pool. Professional duty teams would be funded jointly by participating packs. Private contacts would provide only the companionship specifically agreed to by the member and would no longer have vague authority to control resources on that person’s behalf.
Real protection would not be reduced.
The only thing being removed was the convenience of crossing other people’s boundaries in the name of care.
When the meeting resumed, the revised proposal was resubmitted.
Vote lights came on one by one.
At the end, only the Lakecrest council remained.