Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 546

Chapter 546

ARIA

They both looked at her.

"The window," Nina said, "is not about avoidance or timing. The window is about the fact that going through the door is socially legible and going through the window requires the other person to notice that you've chosen a path that isn't the obvious one. The door says nothing specific. The window says *I made a deliberate choice that took more effort because I needed it to communicate something the door couldn't.*" She paused. "Everest goes through the door because he's not ready to be legible yet. The window isn't available because the timing is wrong. The window is available because the communication is available. He goes through it in chapter twenty-two because that's when he's ready to be understood, not because that's when the window appeared."

The table was quiet for approximately two seconds.

"That's—" Jordan started.

"That's what I was saying," Ivory said.

"It is not what you were saying," Jordan said.

"It's the implication of what I was saying," Ivory said.

"The implication and the statement are—" Jordan started.

"Nina said it better," Ivory said. "That's allowed. Nina often says things better."

"I don't usually get credit for it," Nina said.

"You're getting credit now," Ivory said.

"I appreciate that," Nina said.

"The window," Kael said, from his position at the desk where he'd been listening to this exchange with the specific expression of a man who'd known it was going to be like this and had decided to be present for it rather than manage it.

Everyone looked at him.

"Is in the book," he said. "And it's also in this room. Like Aria said bluntly as usual. And we all know it's in this room. The question is which window we're talking about and who it belongs to."

The table absorbed this.

"That," Ivory said, "is a significantly more direct entry into this discussion than your usual approach."

"The book club premise," Kael said, "was that we could talk about things using the book as framing. I'm using the framing."

"You are," Ivory said.

"So which window are we talking about," Kael said. "Specifically."

The room went the quiet kind of quiet.

Then everyone spoke at once.

I documented this, internally, because it was one of the most remarkable things I'd witnessed in nine months of being in this pack. Six people — five of them, actually, because Killian was slightly behind the timing — all having an opinion that they produced simultaneously with complete confidence that their opinion was both relevant and worth saying.

Silver, in my head, said: *Oh, this is wonderful.*

Ivory said: "The wolf's integration and the bond channel—"

Jordan said: "The communication gap between—"

Nina said: "The information that's been held back from—"

Kael said: "The things I told Killian about chapter fifteen—"

Killian said: "My specific situation with—"

All of them stopped.

Looked at each other.

Then started again in a slightly different order.

"One at a time," I said.

Nobody listened.

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