She gave me a look over her reading glasses, the look she’d been giving me since I was twelve and tried to convince her I hadn’t eaten the last of the pie. “Mmhm.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know you are, sweetheart.”
I took a breath, held it, let it out. “There’s something else. I’m pregnant.”
Hilda went still. She looked at my face, then at my stomach, then back at my face. I braced myself for worry, for disappointment, for the conversation about timing and readiness and what about the father.
Her eyes filled with tears. She pressed her hand over her mouth.
Then she pulled me into a hug so tight it hurt.
“A baby,” she said into my hair. “Oh, Andy. A baby.”
“You’re not mad?”
“Mad? I’m thrilled. I’m going to be a great-grandmother.” She pulled back and cupped my face with both hands, her palms warm and rough from the garden. “You listen to me. This baby is a gift. Whatever happened with that man, this baby is yours. And you are not alone. You have me. You have always had me.”
I nodded, crying again, and she wiped my tears with her thumbs the way she’d been doing since I was small enough to sit on her lap.
“Now,” she said, standing up and brushing off her skirt with the efficiency of a woman who had already moved on to the practical phase, “your room needs a crib. And we need prenatal vitamins. And I’m going to need to know your due date so I can start knitting.”
“Grandma, you don’t know how to knit.”
“Then I’ll learn. I have months.”
That night, in my childhood bed, under the quilt my mother sewed, I put my hand on my flat stomach. The room was dark and quiet. The house smelled like lavender. The peonies outside the window were long gone but the garden was still there, wild and overgrown, waiting for someone to tend it.
“It’s just us, little one,” I whispered. “We’re going to be okay.”
27
— • —
Finneas
The new assistant set my morning briefing on the edge of my desk like she was feeding an animal at the zoo. Quick, careful, ready to pull her hand back.
“The client call is at ten,” she said, not making eye contact.
“Fine.”
“And there’s a scheduling conflict with the quarterly review and the...”
“Handle it.”
“Which one should I prioritize?”
“I said handle it.”
She flinched. I heard it, the small intake of breath, the half-step backward, and I hated myself for it because Andrea never flinched. Not once, not even on her first day when I was at my worst. Andrea would have set the briefing down, told me to figure it out myself since I was a grown man, monitored my coffee intake, threatened me with pink wallpaper, and the day would have started and it would have been fine.
The assistant left. I stared at the briefing without reading it.
She sat at Andrea’s desk. HR had cleared it before the new hire started, swept the dead peonies into a trash bag, wiped down the surface, removed the personal touches. I’d come in the morning after and the desk was clean, the vase gone, the pink pen that had rolled underneath picked up and discarded. The only thing left was the chair, pushed back at the angle Andrea had left it, and even that had been adjusted for someone new. I stood there staring at the clean desk for ten minutes before I could make myself walk into my office.
My wolf hadn’t spoken to me since the rejection. The silence where he used to be was worse than any howling. I’d tried to shift three times in the past week. Nothing. My body refused. He’d shut himself behind a wall and I could feel the emptiness of it like a room that used to have furniture, the outlines still visible on the carpet but the thing itself gone.
