He laughed. The real one, open, warm. The laugh I’d been pulling out of him since a porch and a dog and a book with a terrible Scottish accent. He pressed his mouth against the top of my head and kept walking.
The estate came into view. The animal wing, the garden, the front door. Buddy was barking from inside, upset about being left behind, and the sound was so normal, so absurdly domestic after what we’d just been through, that I laughed too.
The afternoon sun was warm on my face. Finneas’s hand was warm around mine. Alex kicked once, hard, like punctuation.
We were going home.
Inside, the door closed behind us, and Finneas let go of my hand and walked to the kitchen window. He stood there with his back to me, both hands on the counter, his head down.
I gave him a minute. Then I went to him.
I couldn’t wrap my arms around him from behind anymore because the belly made that geometrically impossible, so I pressed myself against his side and put my hand on his back. His muscles were rigid under my palm.
“You did the right thing,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
“Finneas.”
“I know.” His voice was rough. “I know I did.”
“But knowing it was right doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt.”
He turned his head. His eyes were red. He hadn’t cried in front of the pack, hadn’t let his voice crack once through the sentencing, hadn’t shown a single thing that wasn’t the King. But we were home now. The door was closed. And the man underneath the crown was looking at me with his eyes wet and his jaw shaking.
“She’s my mother,” he said. “She did terrible things and she’s still my mother.”
“I know.”
“I keep thinking about this one time. I was maybe seven, eight. I had a nightmare about my father’s wolf and I was screaming and none of the staff could calm me down. She came to my room. Didn’t say anything, didn’t hug me, didn’t tell me it was okay. Just sat on the edge of the bed and stayed until I fell back asleep.” His voice cracked. “That’s the best memory I have of my mother. Her sitting on my bed in silence. That’s it. And I still can’t stop thinking about it.”
I pulled his head down to my shoulder. He went, heavy, his forehead pressed against my neck, his breathing ragged. I held him the way he’d held me in the hospital, the way he’d held me on the bedroom floor after the pack introduction. One hand on the back of his head, the other on his back, holding him together while he let himself fall apart in the only place where he could.
“You’re allowed to grieve her,” I said into his hair. “Even after everything. You’re allowed to miss who she used to be.”
He didn’t say anything. His shoulders shook once, hard, and I held on tighter.
We stood in the kitchen until the light shifted. Buddy came and pressed against our legs. Alex kicked between us. The afternoon sun warmed the counter where Finneas made coffee every morning. I held the King while he cried for his mother and I thought: this is what it means to be his partner. Not the crown, not the title. This. The kitchen. The grief. The holding on.
46
— • —
Finneas
I was on the nursery floor at eight in the evening surrounded by pieces of a bassinet that arrived from Whitebrook in a box with a handwritten note taped to the top:Build it right or I’ll fly out and do it myself. Don’t test me.
Andrea’s grandmother had been shipping things for weeks. The rocking chair was first. Then baby blankets. Then a box of onesies she’d apparently been stockpiling since Andrea told her about the pregnancy. Now a bassinet. In pieces. With instructions in what I was fairly sure was Swedish and screws designed for hands half the size of mine. The woman was either testing me or trying to break me and honestly it could go either way.
The instructions were useless. I’d been at this for forty minutes. The thing looked less like a bassinet and more like evidence of a furniture crime.
Andrea was in the doorway eating ice cream out of the container with a spoon, watching me struggle the way she watched most of my failures: with visible enjoyment.
“You’re putting the rail on backward,” she said.
“It’s not backward.”
“The curve faces out.”
