“It might be a boy.”
“What’s his name?”
“Finneas.”
“Finneas? What kind of name is Finneas? Is he British?”
“He’s not British, Grandma.”
“Is he tall?”
“Very.”
“Does he treat you right?”
“He’s working on it.”
“Working on it? That doesn’t sound reassuring.”
“It’s complicated. But yes. He treats me right.”
“Bring him here. I want to see his face. I want to look him in the eye and decide if he deserves my Andy.”
“He’d probably be terrified of you.”
“Good. He should be. Your grandfather was terrified of my mother for forty years and it was the healthiest relationship in the family.”
After we hung up I sat on the couch with my phone in my lap and the noodles going cold. I missed her so fiercely it felt physical, an ache that settled behind my sternum and pressed. She’d told me the house was quiet like it was no big deal, but I could hear what she wasn’t saying underneath it, that the rooms felt too big when you’re the only person walking through them, that silence gets louder the longer you sit in it. I knew because my house in Atlanta felt the same way on the nights he wasn’t there.
The following Thursday I was at my desk reviewing a client contract, the afternoon stretching out normal and unremarkable, when his phone rang inside the office. I could hear it through the glass. He picked up and I watched his facechange through the wall, the color draining, his jaw locking, his whole body going rigid in his chair.
He hung up, stood, grabbed his jacket. When he came out of the office his face was stone.
“What happened?” I asked.
“My mother is in the hospital.”
My stomach dropped. I knew that call. I knew that face. I wore it when I was fifteen and someone called my grandmother’s house and said there had been an accident on the highway.
“What do they know? Is she okay?”
“I don’t know yet. I need to go.”
He was already moving toward the elevator and I grabbed my bag and stood up. I could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his hands were shaking even as he tried to hold them still, and I wasn’t going to let him walk into that alone. I knew what it felt like to sit in a hospital waiting room by yourself, staring at a door, wondering if the person behind it was going to come out the same way they went in. I did it at fifteen. I wasn’t letting him do it now.
“I’m coming with you.”
He hesitated. Looked at me, then at the elevator, then back at me.
“Finneas. I’m coming.”
He nodded.
In the car his hand found mine and he gripped it so hard my knuckles ached. He didn’t speak the entire drive, jaw clenched, eyes fixed on the road, and I didn’t make him. I watched his face and saw the fear underneath the control, the boy who lost his father at twenty-four trying to hold it together in case he was about to lose his mother too. I held his hand tighter and didn’t let go.
The hospital was bright and cold, antiseptic smell hitting me the second we walked through the doors. I stayed close to him without crowding, hovering a step behind while he talked to the doctor in the corridor. I caught fragments: tumor, rare for a shifter, the healers had confirmed. My chest tightened with every word because I could see what it was doing to him, each piece of information landing like a blow he was absorbing without flinching.
Then the elevator at the end of the hall opened and Lorraine stepped out with an older woman beside her. I’d never seen the woman before but the resemblance was impossible to miss: same red hair going silver at the temples, same sharp cheekbones, same posture, like they’d both been taught to walk by the same person who believed spines should be vertical at all times. Had to be her mother. Both in heels, both looking like they’d come from somewhere expensive. Lorraine saw him and her face crumbled and she threw herself at him, arms around his neck, sobbing against his shoulder.
