That night I sat on the porch. Grandma’s porch, the swing my father built, wood weathered smooth from years of use. I’d been reading here every evening since I arrived, drawn to it without understanding why until I was already sitting down with a book and the quiet pressing in from every direction.
I started the highland series over. Page one, chapter one.
I read silently, turning pages without the voices, without the terrible Scottish accent that made Fin huff. The hero was being stubborn, the heroine was calling him on it, and I used to perform every word of it. I used to pause between chapters and say things like “See, Fin? This is what communication looks like. You should take notes. Tell your owner.” The memory of my own voice saying those words to a dog on my Atlanta porch hit me so hard I had to set the book down for a second.
I picked it back up. Kept reading.
Two chapters in, my hand dropped to the space beside me on the swing.
Reaching for warm fur that wasn’t there.
I caught myself and pulled my hand back. The absence punched through me, sudden, total. I closed the book, pressed it against my chest, breathed through the tightness in my throat. The swing creaked under me, empty on one side, crickets filling the space where his breathing used to be.
I missed him. The grunt when I handed him a report. The rolled sleeves, the forearms I’d stared at for two years. The way he held his coffee mug like it had personally wronged him. I missed the warm weight against my side on the porch, the head in my lap, the dark eyes watching me while I read. I missed reaching down without looking and finding fur under my fingers, soft and warm, his ear twitching when I scratched behind it.
I couldn’t separate them. The man, the wolf. Losing one meant losing both.
I put my hand on my stomach. The swing rocked gently under me, the chains creaking in a rhythm that almost sounded like breathing if I let myself pretend.
“It’s just us,” I said to the dark. “We’re going to be okay.”
Grandma’s light was still on inside. I could see her through the window, sitting in her chair with a book and her reading glasses, waiting up for me without saying she was waiting up for me. She’d been doing that every night. Leaving her light on until I came in from the porch, the same way she’d left it on when I was sixteen and staying out too late.
I went inside, kissed her forehead as I passed her chair, and she squeezed my hand without looking up from her book. “Goodnight, Andy.”
“Goodnight, Grandma.”
I got into the bed with the quilt my mother sewed. Lay there with my hand on my belly in the dark.
I didn’t cry tonight. I just breathed and held on.
Not every night was like that. Some nights I cried until the pillow was wet, missing him with a ferocity that scared me because it hadn’t faded despite everything he’d done. Some mornings the ache was so heavy I couldn’t get out of bed. I’d lie there with my face in the pillow, grief pressing on my chest, thinking about staying there forever.
But the baby was growing. Grandma was downstairs making tea. The therapy group met on Wednesday. I talked to Mary every morning. I was surrounded by supportive people.
So I got up. Every time, I got up.
29
— • —
Finneas
Lorraine came out from behind the curtain in white and I tried to feel something.
I sat in a velvet chair in a bridal shop that smelled like gardenias, surrounded by mirrors that reflected a man who hadn’t slept properly in weeks, while two attendants fussed with the train of a dress I was supposed to care about. Her mother was dabbing her eyes in the corner, already on her second tissue. The champagne on the side table had gone flat. Nobody was drinking it.
“What do you think?” Lorraine turned in front of the three-panel mirror, the fabric catching light, her red hair pinned up, her face bright with a happiness I couldn’t match no matter how hard I tried.
She was beautiful. I could see that objectively the way I could see that the shop was well-decorated or the champagne was expensive. Information my brain processed without my chest being involved at all.
I searched for something. Warmth, pride, the flicker of a future I could live with. I looked at the dress, the veil, the woman inside them, and I waited for my body to respond the way it was supposed to when the person you were marrying stood in front of you in white.
Nothing came.
She smiled at me over her shoulder and I sat there with my hands on the armrests of the chair feeling exactly what I’d feel watching a stranger try on clothes through a shop window. Mild acknowledgment. Complete disconnection.
“Finneas? Do you like it?”
