Chapter Twelve
Christa
I don’t sleep that night. I lie in Toby’s bed long after he finally drifted off beside me, exhausted from adrenaline in a way I recognise because I feel it too, and stare at the ceiling replaying the afternoon over and over until the shapes of it stop making sense.
Not the fear exactly. I expect the fear to linger, three years of training tells me it will, that my body will spend days jumping at shadows, replaying his hand on my arm, the particular terror of being dragged toward a car I didn’t choose to get into.
That part is familiar. I know how to survive that part; I’ve survived worse versions of it more times than I want to count.
I can feel it sitting there already, a low background hum I recognise from a hundred mornings after bad nights, the kind of fear that doesn’t need active thoughts to keep humming along underneath everything else.
What keeps me awake is Toby.
Not the run, not even the moment he wrenched my ex’s grip off me with a strength that still makes my stomach flip to think about.
It was after. The stillness that had come over him, cold and total, a version of him I’ve never once glimpsed in three months of watching him be endlessly, deliberately gentle with everything he touches.
I’ve seen him crouch small in gravel that first night, careful not to loom.
I’ve watched him hold a newborn chick like it might shatter, cupping his hands large enough to crush it without meaning to and somehow never once came close to it.
And then I watched something in him go quiet and lethal in the space of a ingle breath, controlled violence sitting right below the surface of a man I let myself believe was ssafe precisely because he’s never shown me that side of himself.
I lie in the dark I understand that both are true.
That gentleness and the violence live in the same chest, the same hands, and that the violence has been in service of protecting me, every ounce of it aimed at a man who earned every bit of the fear I watched cross his face before he ran.
I understand that logically. I’ve told Toby more than once this evening, that I’m not afraid of him, that I understand exactly why he did what he did and would do it again without hesitation.
I just didn’t expect the small, unwelcome flicker of fear to show up anyway, uninvited, sitting quietly under all my rational understanding like I splinter I can’t quite work free.
It isn’t fair to him, that flicker. I know that even as I feel it.
But fairness has never had much to do with what my body decides to be afraid of, and three years of learning the hard way that gentle men can turn dangerous in an instant isn’t a lesson that unlearns itself just because, this time the danger had been pointed somewhere other than me.
I get up before dawn, unable to lie still with my own thoughts any longer and go to sit on the porch step wrapped in one of Toby’s shirts, watching the sky go from black to grey to the first edges of sunlight.
The garden bed sits undisturbed a few yards off, my own handprints still pressed faintly into the soil from the day before, a strange, small monument to how ordinary the morning had started before it hadn’t.
I hear him behind me before he speaks, he always moves quiet for a man his size, but I’ve learned these past months to feel him coming before I hear him, some awareness under my skin that has stopped needing my conscious attention to register his presence.
“Couldn’t sleep either.” He says, settling beside me at a careful distance, more space than he usually gives me these days. I notice it immediately. Understand, with a small ache, exactly why he’s chosen it.
“You don’t have to sit that far away.” I say.
He hesitates. “I wasn’t sure you’d want me close. After yesterday.”
I turn to look at him properly, taking in the exhaustion sitting heavy in his face, the careful, guarded way he’s watching me like a man bracing for a verdict he already expects to be bad.
Something in my chest cracks at that, not for me, for him, for whatever he’s been lying awake all night believing about himself.
“I’m not scared of you,” I say and I mean it, even with the small splinter still sitting somewhere underneath the words.
“I want to be honest with you though. Yesterday, when I saw you… that stillness, right before he ran. I don’t know what he saw in your face, but I saw something too. Something I’ve never seen from you before. And it scared me for a second. Not because I thought you’d turn it on me.
Because I’ve spent three years learning that men who can be gentle can also be that. Both things living in the same person. I know the difference with you. I do. But some old part of me flinched anyway, and I don’t think that part’s going to catch up to the rest of me overnight.”
He’s quiet for a long moment, absorbing that with the same careful weight he gives everything, and I watch him decide, visibly, not to defend himself, not to rush to reassure me out of an honesty that clearly costs me something to voice.
“That’s fair,” he finally says. “I won’t ask you to feel differently than you feel. I’d rather you tell me the truth, even when it’s not comfortable for either of us, than watch you pretend everything’s fine because you think that’s what I need to hear.”
He looks out at the treeline for a moment, jaw working like he’s choosing his next words carefully.
“For what it’s worth… that stillness you saw. I’ve felt it exactly twice in my life. Once when Marlow first told me about the chosen mate, before I understood I could refuse it. And yesterday. It’s not something that comes easy to me,
and it’s not something I want living anywhere near you on an ordinary day. But I won’t apologise for what it did for you yesterday. I’d let it out again in a heartbeat if it meant you walked away safe.”
“I know,” I say. “I’m not asking you to apologise. I’m just telling you the truth, the way you asked me to.”
I look out toward the treeline.
“I don’t think you’re dangerous to me,” I continue, needing him it hear the rest of it.
“I need you yo know that clearly. I think you’re the safest person I’ve ever known. I just… I think I might need a little time to let all of me believe that at the same pace, even the parts that learned the hard way not to trust.”
“Take whatever time you need,” he reaches over sloe, giving me every chance to pull back, and I let his hand find mine, lacing our fingers together with a gentleness that does more to settle the splinter than any words can.
“I’m not going anywhere. Not because of anything you feel about yesterday. Not because of anything at all.”
We sit together as the sun clears the treeline, hands loosely joined, neither of us says much else.
It isn’t a fix, not fully, I can still feel the small unresolved edge of yesterday sitting somewhere in my chest, waiting for time to smooth it down properly.
But it’s honest. And honest, I’m learning, matters more to both of us than pretending things are simpler than they actually are.
We called the police that afternoon at Toby’s insistence, something that I resisted at first, some old instinct telling me involving the anyone official will only complicate things, drag my name into a system that has never once, in my experience, actually protected me form anything.
In every foster placement, every group home, every quiet crisis of my childhood, official channels had mostly meant paperwork and delay, adults to meant well but moved too slowly to matter in the moments that actually counted.
I don’t expect this to be any different and I tell Toby as much.
He doesn’t push exactly, but he lays out his reasoning clearly and lets me make the choice myself: a report on record he said, would mater if this ever escalates further, would give any future incident a paper trail instead of starting from nothing.
If it ever came to a courtroom, or worse, having documentation from today will matter more than either of is wants to think about right now.
He’s not trying to hand me over to a system I don’t trust.
He’s trying to make sure that if the system ever does need to act, it won’t be starting from zero.
I make the call myself, sitting on the porch steps with his hand steady on my back, and give a deputy over the phone a version of events flattened down to the essential facts, an ex-partner, an assault, a man who fled the scene before authorities can respond.
I don’t mention what Toby is. Don’t know how I would explain it even if I wanted to, and some protective instinct in me has already decided, without discussion, that this particular truth belongs only to people who’s earned it honestly, not to a stranger taking notes on the other end of the line.
The deputy takes me ex’s name and says they’ll look into it, mentioned a restraining order I can file if I want.
I thank her and hang up feeling strange and hollow, like I’ve just performed a version of taking control that doesn’t quite match the powerlessness still sitting under my skin.
A piece of paper has never stopped him before. I don’t fully believe it would now.
Toby seems to read exactly what I’m thinking, because he doesn’t offer any hollow reassurance about the report solving anything.
“It’s one more layer,” he says instead. “Not the only one. I’m not going to pretend paperwork keeps you safe. That’s what I’m here for.”
That evening, after a dinner neither of us has much appetite for, Toby tells me something he’s apparently been turning over all day.
“I want to tell my clan what happened,” he says.
“Not to alarm them. But Marlow should know there’s a threat out here, in case it ever comes anywhere near clan land. And there are people there… trackers, people with skills I don’t have on my own, who could help make sure he doesn’t get another chance to find you.”
Something in me goes tight at the word clan, some old anxiety about being handed off, discussed, made into a problem for other people to solve on my behalf without my input.
That particular fear has deep roots, a lifetime of being talked about in rooms I wasn’t allowed into, case files and staffing meetings deciding my future while I sit in a hallway to be told what came next.
He must see it cross my face, because he stops immediately, waiting.
“I’m not deciding this without you,” he says. “I wanted to ask first. If you’d rather keep this between us, I’ll respect that, even though I think it makes you less safe. This is your call, not mine.”
I sit with the offer a long moment, turning it over, weighing the old instinct to handle everything myself against newer, still-fragile instinct that has started over these last three months, to believe that letting people help doesn’t automatically mean losing control of my own life.
I think about his mother’s easy hug, about his father’s quiet approval, about the warmth of a family who folded me I without a single condition attached.
If that’s any indication of what the rest of his clan might be like, maybe this particular fear doesn’t nee to run the show this time.
“Okay,” I say finally. “Tell them. But I want to be part of whatever happens next. I don’t want to be something people manage around. I want to be part of the plan.”
“You will be,” he says and I believe him, the same steady, unshakable belief I’ve been building in him for three months now, one honest promise at a time. “Every step of it.”
I look out at the darkening treeline, thinking about my ex somewhere out there, running scared but not gone, not yet, and feel something harden in my chest that wasn’t there this morning, not just fear anymore, but a kind of resolve I haven’t let myself access in a long time.
I ran once, alone, with four hundred dollars and no plan beyond escape.
I’m not that woman anymore, I’m not facing it as someone’s victim either.
I’m facing it as someone with a home to defend, and people whose already proved, more than once, that they’ll stand between me and anything that tries to take it away.