Chapter Sixteen
Christa
Five months in, and I notice the change in my own body before I let myself name it out loud.
Small things at first, I started turning down coffee some mornings, wrinkling my nose at the smell that has never bothered me before, tired in a way that doesn’t match the pace of our days.
I put it down to the move at first, all the packing, the emotional weight of leaving a place that had saved my life, the strange new rhythm of visiting clan land more and more often as we prepare to make it permanent.
It was easy, for a week of so to explain each small symptom away individually, the way I once learned to explain away all sorts of things that should’ve alarmed me sooner.
But bodies keep their own counsel, regardless of what a person decides to believe about them, and by the second week I couldn’t keep talking myself out of a pattern forming underneath all the individual explanations.
I find myself doing math in my head more than once, counting backward, counting again, not quite letting myself land on the conclusion the numbers keep offering.
I don’t say anything to Toby right away.
Some old, careful part of me needs to be sure before I hand him something this size, need to hold the possibility quietly in my own hands for a few days before I let it become real by speaking it.
I catch him watching me more closely than usual though, a searching look over breakfast, a hand that lingers a little longer than usual against my back and understand that his bear has probably picked up on something before either of us has put words to it.
He never pushes, just waits, the way he always waits, giving me room to arrive to things in my own time.
I finally go to him on a Tuesday afternoon, standing in the kitchen doorway with an expression I can feel on my face without needing a mirror, not fear, not quite. Something more like disbelief, sitting right on the edge of hope.
“I think I need to go to town,” I say. “To the pharmacy.”
I don’t have to explain why. Something shifts behind his eyes immediately, some deep, wordless certainty settling into his expression, his bear going still and attentive in a way I recognise from the night he first found me.
“I’ll drive you.”
He’s quiet the whole way there, one hand on my knee the entire drive, steady, present, not pushing me to talk before I’m ready. I understand, holding onto his hand, that he already knows what I haven’t said yet, and that he’s giving me room to arrive at it in my own time anyway.
I make him wait in the truck once we get there.
Not because I don’t want him there, I do, more than I can easily say, but because some stubborn part of me needs to do this one thing alone first, need to hold the not-knowing in my own hands before I let anyone else in on it, even him.
I buy what I need with hands that shake slightly at the register, make him drive the short way back to a gas station bathroom because I can’t wait the twenty minutes home, and sit on the closed lid of a toilet in a stall that smells like industrial cleaner,
watching a small plastic window that feels like it’s about to decide the rest of my life.
Two lines. Clear, unmistakable, no room for doubt.
I sit there for a long moment just breathing, feeling something enormous and unfamiliar crack open my chest, not fear, though I half expected fear, some warning that nothing this big can possibly be safe.
Instead what I find is something closer to wonder.
A future. An actual, real, undeniable future, growing right now inside a body I’ve spent years believing existed only to be used and discarded, not apparently capable of building something entirely on its own.
I think as I sit in this small, ugly bathroom stall, about every version of myself that came before this moment, the girl who learned not to unpack fully because placements never lasted, the woman who shrunk herself smaller and smaller trying to keep a dangerous man calm,
the frightened stranger who broke down on a road she didn’t recognise with nothing but four hundred bucks and a blanket, None of those versions of me could have imagined this.
None of them would have believed a future like this was actually possible, let alone theirs to have.
I let myself sit with that contrast a moment longer than I probably need to, some part of me wanting to properly mark the distance I travelled before I let the next chapter of my life begin.
I find Toby exactly where I left him, leaning against the truck, trying and failing to look casual about the wait. I don’t say anything. Just walk up and hold out the test, watching his face as understanding dawns across it in slow, disbelieving stages.
“Christa…” My name comes out of him rough, barely a whisper.
“Yeah,” I say, and feel my own eyes fill without meaning to. “Yeah.”
He pulls me into him so fast and so completely that I lose my footing for a second, laughing through the tears I haven’t quite decided to let fall, his hands move over me like he’s trying to memorise, this exact version of the two of us, before it can ever slip away.
“A cub,” he says, wonder plain in his voice. “We’re having a cub.”
“We’re having a cub.” I echo and let myself say it out loud, let myself claim it fully, this enormous, terrifying, wonderful thing that neither of us has any intention of running from.
We tell his parents that weekend, and I watch his mother’s face crumple into tears of pure joy before she’s even fully processed the words, pulling me into a hug so tight it nearly lifts me off my feet.
His father shakes Toby’s hand and then after a visible internal debate, hugs him too, gruff and brief and entirely sincere.
Word reaches the clan almost before we’ve made it back to our own land, some invisible network of family passing news faster than any phone call could have managed, and by the time we visit again the following week, half the clan seems to already know, greeting me with a warmth that has somehow,
impossibly, deepened even further.
Marlow met the news with something close to reverence, taking both my hands in his and telling me, plainly, that this cub will grow up surrounded by more family than either of its parents has ever had, and that he intends to make good on that promise personally.
He asks, carefully, whether I want a formal welcoming, some old clan tradition for expectant mates that Toby later explains involves the whole community gathering to bless the new cub before it’s even born, and I find myself saying yes before I fully think it through,
some part of me hungry for exactly that kind of ritual after a lifetime with none.
Priya hugs me so hard I nearly lose my breath, already rattling off advice about the first trimester with the easy, practical warmth of someone whose walked this exact road twice before and came out the other side entirely intact.
She promises to walk me through everything, what to expect from a body that is, in this case, entirely human carrying a cub that won’t entirely be, what questions to ask the clan’s healer, what none of the human parenting books will think to prepare me for.
I cling to that promise harder than I probably let on.
Having someone whose actually done this, who can tell me honestly what is coming instead of leaving me to guess, matters more than I have words for in this moment.
I believe all of it. I learned, over these five months, to believe most things this family tells me.
We decide to move to clan territory permanently not long after, a decision that took less deliberation than I’d expected, once we actually sat down to talk it through.
The small cabin, the second cabin, this whole quiet corner of land that saved my life five months ago will always matter to us, Toby says, but a cub deserves to grow up surrounded by cousins and aunts and a whole community of people whose already claimed it as theirs before it has even arrived.
I find I don’t need much convincing. I’ve spent my whole childhood being moved from place to place with nothing waiting for me at the other end.
This time, I’m moving toward something. Toward people who wants me there.
Toward a home that has already decided, collectively, that I belong.
I did ask him, once, quietly, whether he minds leaving the land he’s built with his own hands during six lonely years, whether some part of him will grieve that solitude even now that he has every reason to be glad its ended.
He thinks about the question seriously, the way he thinks about most things, and tells me that the land has only ever mattered to him because it was his.
Now what matters is wherever I am, wherever our cub will grow up, and that home, for him, had stopped being a place a long time before either of us realised it. Its already became a person instead.
We talk, too, about what we’ll keep and what we’ll let go, the small cabin, we agree, will stay standing regardless, some part of both of us unwilling to let go entirely of the place where everything started.
Toby suggests, half-joking at first and then more seriously as the idea takes hold, that we might use it someday as a retreat, somewhere to bring the cub when it’s older, to show it exactly where its parents had found each other.
I like that idea more than I let on. Some things deserve to be preserved rather than simply left behind.
We pack slowly, over the following weeks, both of us a little sentimental about leaving the land where everything had started, but neither of us doubting, even for a moment, that we’re moving toward the right thing.
Priya helps me pick out a plot near her own cabin when the day finally comes, walking me through the practical realities of raising a child here with the easy confidence of someone whose done it twice already and came out the other side happy.
“You’re going to be fine,” she tells me, more than once, in the weeks leading up to the move. “Better than fine. You’ve already survived the hardest part. Everything else is just showing up, the way Marlow said.”
I hold onto that. Hold onto Toby’s hand, and the small, steady flutter of movement that has started, faintly, somewhere deep in my own body, proof of a future I once believed wasn’t meant for someone like me.
On the morning we finally load the truck for the last time, I stand a while on the porch of the small cabin, looking out at the clearing where it had all began, the spot where the car had once sat dead and dark, the garden bed I dug with my own hands, the porch steps where I learned,
one careful conversation at a time, what it feels like to be wanted without conditions attached.
I don’t feel sad, exactly, standing here.
I feel something closer to gratitude, the particular kind that comes from recognising a place has done exactly what it needs to do and can now, rightfully, let you go.
Toby finds me there, wraps his arms around me from behind, chin resting light on the top of my head. “Ready?” he asks.
“Ready.” I say and mean it completely.
I was wrong about a lot of things, once, the same way I’d been wrong about so much else since the night my car broke down on a stranger’s land. Safe is real. Family is real. And whatever comes next, I’m walking into it surrounded by more love than I’ve ever once let myself imagine possible.