Chapter Fourteen
Christa
I spend the whole drive to clan territory running through everything that can go wrong, an old habit I haven’t managed to shake even after four months of evidence that Toby’s world doesn’t actually work the way my anxiety keeps insisting it does.
What if they’re only polite because he asked them to be.
What if I say something wrong, some small foster kid awkwardness I’ve never fully outgrown, and it becomes the thing they remember me by.
What if belonging, once I actually get close enough to touch it, turns out to be another thing I’m not built to hold onto.
I packed and unpacked my bag twice this morning, unable to settle on anything that felt right, before Toby had finally, gently, taken the decision out of my hands and told me I could wear the dirt from the garden if I wanted, that nobody out there is going to care what I have on.
I believed him, mostly. The anxious part of me keeps running its own calculations anyway, some habit that four months of gentleness hasn’t fully managed to quiet.
I’ve asked him more than once over the preceding week, what I should call people, what topics to avoid, whether there’s some unspoken protocol for a human meeting an entire shifter clan for the first time.
He laughs, not unkind, and tells me there isn’t a rulebook, that the only thing anyone will actually care about is whether I make him happy, and that the evidence for that is already written all over both our faces whenever we’re within ten feet of each other.
I believe him a little more with every mile that passes, watching his own nerves show themselves in small, uncharacteristic ways, a thumb tapping the wheel, a longer than usual silence before he speaks.
“You’re nervous too.” I say catching it.
“A little,” he admits. “Been six years. People change, places change. I want it to go well for you as much as I want it to go well for me.”
Toby keeps one hand on my knee the entire drive, steady and present, glancing over more than once with a small, reassuring smile that tells me he’s clocked exactly what my silence means even without me saying a word.
“You don’t have to perform anything today,” he says, somewhere past the halfway mark. “Nobody’s grading this. You just have to be there. That’s the whole assignment.”
“Easy for you to say. You grew up knowing you belonged somewhere.”
“I did,” he agrees. “And I’m telling you, from that experience, belonging was never actually about earning it. I just got lucky enough to be born into people who gave it to me before I’d done anything to deserve it. That’s the same thing that’s about to happen to you.
You don’t have to deserve it first. You just have to let them give it.”
I don’t have a good response to that. Just reach over and lace my fingers through his and let the rest of the drive pass in a silence that feels less anxious than it did an hour earlier.
The clearing that opens up as we come over the final rise takes my breath away in a way I didn’t expect.
A cluster of cabins, some grand, some modest, arranged loosing around a central green where a handful of children are chasing each other, shrieking with laughter, one of that, I will learn later,
a girl no older than seven briefly shifts into a small bear cub mid-run without anyone so much as glancing over.
Smoke rises from a dozen chimneys. Someone is cooking something that smells incredible, drifting warm and rich across the whole clearing.
It looks, more than anything else, like a place that has been lived in and loved for a very long time.
I find myself gripping Toby’s hand a little tighter as we pull up, taking in the sheer scale of it, more people in one place than I’ve seen gathered anywhere since before I can remember, all of it humming with an easy,
unguarded normalcy that makes my own carefully cultivated vigilance feel suddenly, strangely out of place.
Nobody here looks braced for anything. Nobody here seems to be waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I don’t fully know what to do with a whole community that simply expects things to be fine.
People starts noticing the truck almost immediately, and I feel my whole body go tight with the old instinct to brace for scrutiny.
But what I get instead is warmth, immediate and overwhelming, people drift toward us with open curiosity instead of suspicion, a few calling out greetings to Toby that carries real affection, real relief at seeing him.
Marlow reaches us first, tall, silver-beard, exactly as commanding as Toby’s description has led me to expect, but with eyes that crinkles warm the moment they land on me.
“You must be Christa,” he says, offering his hand instead of the hug I half-braced for, some instinct in him apparently understanding without being told that I might need the choice of how close to let someone get.
I appreciate that more than I can say. I take his hand and shake it, and something in his grip firm, careful, nothing demanding in it at all, settles a little more of my nerves.
“Thank you for having me,” I say.
“Thank you for bringing my boy home,” he says, and something in his voice cracks slightly on the last word, some old grief finally finding its resolution. “You’ve done more for this family in four months than I managed in six years of trying.”
Toby’s mother finds us next, sweeping me into a hug before I fully register her approaching, and this time I let myself lean into it instead of just enduring it, some small,
warm part of me finally starting to trust that this particular kind of affection isn’t going to come with strings attached later.
She introduces me to what feels like a dozen people in the space of ten minutes cousins, an aunt, a woman named Priya who, I learn with a jolt of surprised recognition, is human too, mated to one of the clan’s trackers,
raising two half-shifter children who runs by us at that exact moment in a blur of noise and mud.
“You’re not the only one,” Priya says, catching my expression, smiling. “There’s a handful of us here. It gets easier. I promise you, it gets so much easier.”
I feel something in my chest loosen at that more than almost anything else today, the simple, concrete proof that this life has already been lived successfully by someone else, that I’m not the first human to walk in here overwhelmed and uncertain and figure out, eventually,
how to make a home of it.
I ask her, quietly, when it starts feeling normal instead of surreal, and she laughs, said honestly it’d taken her the better part of a year, that there’s no shortcut through the strangeness of it,
only time and repetition and the slow accumulation of ordinary days that eventually outweighs the extraordinary ones.
It isn’t the answer I hoped for, exactly, but it’s an honest one, and I find trusting it more for that.
The afternoon unfolds slower after that, easier, a shared meal at long tables set up across the green, more introductions than I can hope to remember on the first try, Toby’s hand finds mine under the table more than once like he’s checking, still, that I’m alright.
I am. More than alright, somewhere around the third hour, watching him laugh with cousins he hasn’t seen in years, watching Marlow watch him with something like fierce, relieved pride, watching children whose never once been taught to be afraid of what they are.
I find myself seated for a stretch of the meal between Toby’s mother and an older woman called Idris who, I learn, has helped raise half the clan’s current generation of cubs and has opinions about nearly everything, delivered with a bluntness that somehow never tips into unkindness.
She asks me about my own childhood, carefully, gently, backing off the moment she senses the topic tightening something in my shoulders, and when I give her the barest, guarded outline of it, she simply nods, pats my hand once, and says that whatever I didn’t get as a child,
I’ll get triple of it here, whether I ask for it or not.
I don’t know what to say to that. I don’t think she expects me to say anything at all.
Someone produces instruments after the meal, a fiddle, a battered old guitar, a drum one of the older boys clearly isn’t supposed to be playing yet from the way his mother keeps shooting him looks, and the green fills with a loose,
unpolished kind of music that has people dancing regardless of skill, children weave between adults’ legs, laughter carrying easily across the whole clearing.
Toby pulls me up at one point, spinning me clumsily through a dance neither of us actually knows the steps to, both of us laughing too hard to care, and I feel, watching the whole scene unfold around us, something I haven’t let myself feel in longer than I can remember, the simple,
uncomplicated joy of being somewhere with absolutely nothing to fear.
Nobody asks me to explain my bruises, long since faded now, or my past, or why I’d come here the way I had.
A few people, gently, mention they heard I had a hard road before finding Toby, and left it entirely at that, no probing, no demand for the details, just a simple, quiet acknowledgment that makes room for whatever I choose to share without ever requiring it.
Toward evening, as the light starts going gold and long across the green, Marlow finds me alone for a moment while Toby is pulled into some old, laughing argument with a cousin about a fishing trip gone wrong years before.
“How are you finding it?” he asks, settling beside me on the bench with the easy, unhurried presence I’m starting to recognise as characteristic of him.
“Overwhelming,” I admit. “Good overwhelming. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a room, or a clearing, I guess with this many people who all seemed happy to have me there.”
“Get used to it,” he says, warm. “This isn’t a performance we’re putting on for one afternoon. This is just what it looks like here, every day. You’ll see.”
I turn the words over for a moment, testing them against the old suspicion that has kept me safe for so long, and find, to my own quiet surprise, that I mostly believe him. “Toby told me you offered trackers. People to help keep an eye out, in case my ex ever tries something again.”
“I did, and I meant it.” His expression sobers slightly, some of the earlier warmth giving way to something more solemn.
“You should know, whatever happens with that man, whether he ever shows his face again or simply disappears into whatever hole he crawled back into, you’re not facing it from outside this clan looking in. You’re one of us now, in every way that matters. That protection isn’t conditional on anything.
It’s just yours.”
I feel my throat tighten unexpectedly at that, some old, worn-down part of me finally, fully believing what four months of Toby’s patience has been trying to teach me all along, that safety can be handed to a person without a price tag attached,
that belonging doesn’t have to be earned through some exhausting performance of gratitude.
I look out at the green, the children, the smoke curling from a dozen homes, Toby’s easy laughter carrying across the grass and feel something settle deep in my chest that I haven’t let myself feel in longer than I can remember.
Not just safety. Not just relief. Something closer to home, arriving all at once after twenty-four years of never quite finding the shape of it.
“Thank you,” I say, quiet, meaning it more than the small words can really carry. “For all of this. For him.”
“Thank yourself,” Marlow says. “You’re the one who decided to trust it. That’s the hard part. Everything after that is just showing up.”
I watch Toby glance over at me from across the green, catching my eye, something warm and certain passing between us even from a distance. I smile back, and feel, for the first time in longer than I can remember, entirely and completely certain that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.?