Chapter 22 - Caitlynn #2
Her mouth opened. A joke, a redirect—the standard-issue Caitlynn Williams evasive maneuver she’d been deploying since childhood—and nothing came out.
Just a sound caught low in her chest, something soft and startled, because her hands still smelled like flour from this morning’s bread and fire residue dusted her palms, and the wards hummed beneath her feet like a second pulse, and Chris was standing there seeing her the way he’d always seen her, only now there was more of her to see.
“Yeah,” she said. Her voice came out rough. “I think I do.”
Chris put his arm around her shoulders. She leaned into it—the familiar weight, the brotherly solidity of the first person who’d ever made her believe she was worth something and had never once given her reason to doubt it.
“You deserve it,” he said. “You know that, right?”
She pressed her face into his shoulder instead of answering, and he didn’t push.
He never pushed. That was Chris—he’d say the thing, plant it like a seed in soil she didn’t know she had, and then he’d let it sit.
He’d been doing it since they were kids, and she was only now beginning to understand how many of those seeds had taken root without her noticing.
“So,” he said as they sat down on a fallen tree trunk. “I’m going to be an uncle.”
She laughed. “You are going to be an uncle.”
“I’ll be a good one, I think.”
She took his hand, placed it on her growing belly. “I think so too.”
As if she had called it forth, the flutter came. Small. A ripple beneath the skin, barely there, the gentlest announcement of a person who didn’t exist yet and was already making herself known.
Chris’s mouth opened on a sound that wasn’t a word—something that lived below language, raw and unguarded. His eyes went wide and then wet, and his hand pressed harder against her stomach as though he could hold the moment in place.
“Oh wow,” he said, his voice reverent.
“That’s Elianna.”
“She—” He swallowed. Swallowed again. “She kicked.”
“She does that. Usually, when I’m trying to sleep. She has her father’s sense of timing.”
He laughed, and it was a cracked, wet thing—the laugh of a man who hadn’t been expecting to feel this much and didn’t have a container for the surplus. He kept his hand where it was. The flutter came again, stronger, and his fingers spread wider across her belly as if he could catch it.
“There she is,” he whispered.
Something expanded behind Caitlynn’s ribs, warm and unmanageable, pushing against the walls she’d built there.
Chris’s hand on her stomach and his wet eyes and the way he’d said Elianna like a prayer.
Olivia, who’d sat with her through the first panicked hours after the test, confirmed it.
Elena, who left ginger tea without being asked.
The pack of children with their sticky fingers and their endless questions.
Kahn. Insufferable, devoted, impossible Kahn, who read patrol reports out loud in the sitting room and looked at her in his flannel like she’d hung the moon and fought her on everything and stayed through all of it.
Kahn.
Her whole chest ached with it. The ache had been there for weeks—low and constant, flaring every time he walked into a room.
Her blood went hot every time he stood behind her in the clearing, and his breath moved her hair, and her hands shook for reasons that had nothing to do with fire.
She knew what it was. She’d known for weeks, holding the word behind her teeth like something that would shatter if she let it out into the air.
Because the word made it real. And real things could be taken away. Every foster home had taught her that. Every garbage bag is packed in twenty minutes. Every departure, every locked door, every signed paper. The lesson, delivered with perfect reliability: don’t love things you can’t keep.
But Kahn had stayed. Through every wall she’d built and every argument she’d started and every morning she’d woken up sharp and ready for war, he had stayed.
That was the part that kept catching in her chest like a fishhook—not that she might love him, but that he’d given her every reason to, and she was still standing at the edge of it with her fists clenched, unable to jump.
She’d tell him about it. She would. When the word was ready to survive the open air. When she could say it without her voice cracking, without the old machinery of self-protection slamming down like a gate behind her teeth.
Elianna kicked again, and Chris pressed his palm down and said her name—Elianna—, and it sounded like the most sacred word he knew, and Caitlynn sat on the stone bench with flour on her jeans and fire residue on her palms and the afternoon sun turning everything to gold.
She leaned her head on Chris’s shoulder. He rested his cheek against her hair.
The clearing was warm. The wards hummed beneath her feet. Somewhere inside the compound, Kahn was making sounds over a patrol report, and the bread she’d baked at dawn was cooling on Elena’s counter, and the baby turned inside her like a compass needle finding north.
She closed her eyes.
The sun was warm on her face. And for the first time, nowhere else pulled at her. No itch to run. No restless calculation of exits and distances. Just this—the bench, the clearing, the hum beneath her feet, the man beside her, the man inside the house, the daughter turning slowly in the dark.
She didn’t want to be anywhere else.