Chapter 14: (END)

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There’s a particular quality to mornings when you no longer spend them waiting for something to go wrong. I noticed it first about two months after the wedding, lying in bed watching the light change on the ceiling while Theron read beside me, and realizing the waiting had stopped. I didn’t know when exactly. It had just quietly stopped being necessary.

We had settled into each other the way people do when they’re well-matched and both know it: with ease, with occasional friction, with the kind of humor that develops between two people who have seen each other in the morning before coffee. He still moved through the world with that unhurried precision that had first struck me at the dinner table. I still spent too long on cake designs. We were designing a line of seasonal pastries for the bakery and arguing pleasantly about whether pine needle was an appropriate flavor for anything a reasonable person would eat.

One afternoon — winter, the harbor visible from the study window, frost on the glass — I looked up from my sketchbook and asked him the question I’d been half-forming for weeks.

“What would you have done? If our families hadn’t arranged the engagement.”

He was quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of someone buying time, just the quiet of someone deciding how much to say.

“There’s something I should have told you a long time ago,” he said.

He set down his book.

“About five years back, I was invited to a coming-of-age ceremony in one of the smaller packs. I didn’t know anyone there particularly well — I was there as a courtesy. There was a young woman whose ceremony it was, and during the party, a few of the guests had too much wine and someone knocked a glass and it went across a little girl’s dress. A white one. The girl was inconsolable — it was clearly important to her, the dress — and the young woman whose day it was didn’t get angry about the disruption.” He paused. “She went to her study and came back with brushes and paint, and she spent twenty minutes turning the wine stain into a pattern of flowers while she talked to the girl about nothing in particular, and by the end the girl thought she had the best dress at the party.”

I had stopped sketching somewhere around the word flowers.

“The young woman never looked up to see if anyone was watching,” he said. “I don’t think it occurred to her to check. She was just solving the problem in front of her.” He picked up his book again, though he wasn’t reading it. “I went home that night and thought about her for quite a while. Then I found out she was already involved with someone, and I decided that was the end of it.”

R𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘰ո аոy 𝖽𝘦𝘃𝗶c𝖾 𝗈𝗇 𝘨𝗮𝘭ո𝘰𝗏e𝗹𝗌.𝗰𝗈𝗆

“Theron.”

“I kept track, in a general way. Not obtrusively.” A brief pause. “Somewhat obtrusively, if I’m honest. I wanted to make sure — I don’t know. That things were going adequately. They weren’t always, which was difficult to watch from a distance, but I’d made a decision and I intended to keep it.” He looked at me finally. “If the engagement hadn’t happened, I would have continued working abroad. Sent resources back when they were useful. Made sure your bakery had what it needed without you knowing where it came from. Watched you be happy with someone who deserved it.”

The frost on the window had melted in a long stripe down the glass.

I put down my pencil and crossed the room and sat beside him, and he made space for me the way he always did, without any production about it, and I put my head against his shoulder and he rested his chin on my hair.

“You were never going to tell me,” I said.

“It seemed unnecessary once we were married.”

“It’s not unnecessary.”

“No,” he agreed. “I see that now.”

We sat like that for a while. Outside, the harbor moved in the cold light, indifferent and ongoing. I thought about a girl with a ruined white dress, and a woman who hadn’t looked up to see if anyone was watching, and a man who had decided in a single evening to want something and then spent five years finding a quiet way to stay near it without asking for anything.

“I want children,” I said eventually. “Several of them, if that suits you. I want to make them ridiculous clothes.”

I felt him almost laugh. “How ridiculous?”

“Seasonally themed. Starting from infancy.”

“That seems early.”

“It is early. That’s the point.”

He turned toward me then, and what came after was unhurried and warm and a little clumsy in the way that things are when they’re real — his hands finding my face first, the brief moment where we both moved the same direction and had to recalibrate, the laughter that happened and then didn’t matter. There was none of the performance of the early weeks, the careful consideration of what was appropriate. Just us, in the study with the winter light coming through, figuring out the small logistics of being close to someone you trust completely.

Afterward, he pulled the blanket up and I lay with my hand on his chest listening to his heartbeat slow, and somewhere in the distance our wolves moved through the winter woods together, unhurried as we were, belonging to the same piece of the world.

“Theron,” I said, to the ceiling, to the room, to no one in particular.

“Mm.”

“I would have found you. In any version of this.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then: “Yes. I know.”

He said it the way he said most true things — simply, without decoration, as though it had always been obvious.

Maybe it had.

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The End.

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Message from Noa: Have a great Tuesday dear readers. God loves you and Noa wishes you all the best. (=◡=) /

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