Chapter 12:

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Theron took the week off without telling me he was going to. I came downstairs on Monday morning to find him at my kitchen table reading, with the specific settled presence of someone who has decided to be somewhere and does not plan to discuss it.

“I have work,” I said.

“I called the bakery.”

“You called—” I stopped. “Theron.”

“You’ve had a difficult few weeks.” He turned a page. “We’re going to Harrow Cove on Thursday. Is there anything you don’t eat?”

There wasn’t much I could do with that. I sat down and he made me tea, which he did with the same wordless efficiency he brought to most things, and we spent the morning being quietly occupied in the same room, which was — I hadn’t known how much I needed it.

We went to Harrow Cove on Thursday. We walked the harbor and ate grilled fish from a stand near the docks and he let me drag him into a pottery market where I bought three bowls I didn’t need and he carried them without comment. He had a dry, unhurried way of noticing things — he pointed out a dog sleeping in a window display, a sign with a misprint, a child who had dressed herself in what appeared to be three separate costumes simultaneously — and didn’t belabor any of it. Just registered it and moved on, and I found myself laughing more than I had in some time.

𝗥om𝗮nс𝖾 𝘢𝗻𝖽 𝗉a𝗌𝘀іo𝘯 𝗼𝘯 𝗀а𝗹𝗇ov𝘦𝗅𝗌.с𝗼𝗆

My she-wolf was openly delighted. She’d been trying to get my attention about Theron for weeks and felt she deserved some acknowledgment.

She wasn’t wrong.

We had good days and then we had more good days, and the particular self-monitoring I’d done for years — the constant assessment of whether I was being too much, taking up too much space, wanting too much — gradually stopped feeling necessary. Not because he reassured me. He didn’t, particularly. It was more that nothing I did seemed to require management, and that absence of management, over time, was its own kind of reassurance.

One afternoon he said, with the same tone he’d use to ask whether I wanted more tea: “What happened with you and Soren matters to me, for the record.”

I looked up. “You said it didn’t.”

“I said I wasn’t worried about it.” He set down his book. “That’s not the same thing. What he did to you — how long it went on — I should have said that out loud instead of moving on.”

I considered this. “You could have let me finish my sentence.”

“I could have.”

Neither of us said anything for a moment. He picked up his book. I went back to my sketchbook.

It wasn’t a resolution exactly. But it was honest, and honest was more than I’d been used to.

On the night of my birthday, he took me to a rooftop restaurant on the twenty-second floor of the Aldermere building, with a table facing the harbor. I’d been there once before, years ago, for someone else’s celebration; I remembered the view but not who I’d been with.

We’d been there about forty minutes when Theron stopped in the middle of saying something and looked past my shoulder.

I turned around.

The building across the water had a sign on it. White letters, large enough to read from here: Fable, do you want to spend the rest of our lives together?

Then the drones came up — hundreds of them rising from somewhere below the roofline, organizing themselves into shapes above the harbor. Moons. Cakes. A figure with a bow and arrow that took me a second to recognize as Cupid, which made me laugh despite everything because Cupid had been Theron’s idea and Cupid was an extremely funny thing for Theron to have decided on.

When I turned back he was kneeling.

Not performing the kneel — just doing it, in his clan coat with the emblem at the shoulder, holding a ring and looking at me with the particular steadiness that I had by now come to understand was just how he looked at things he was serious about.

“The engagement was our families’ arrangement,” he said. “I’d like to ask the question myself. Will you marry me, Fable?”

Around us, from the other tables, from somewhere behind the host’s stand, the alphas of half a dozen packs materialized out of the shadows. Someone had organized this with considerable logistical effort and considerable discretion, and that combination, I thought, was very Theron.

I gave him my hand.

“Yes,” I said. “Obviously yes.”

He put the ring on and stood, and when he kissed me it was unhurried, the way he did most things, while the drones rearranged themselves overhead into something I didn’t look up to see because I was otherwise occupied.

Our wolves howled from somewhere below the city, long and sure, and the sound of it rose up through the glass and settled around us like something that had always been coming.

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