Chapter Seventeen
Christa
The first weeks on clan land felt like learning to walk again, not because anything about it was hard exactly, but because I spent so long calibrated to a smaller, more careful life that this new, larger one took real deliberate effort to grow into.
Our cabin sits close enough to Priya’s that I can hear her children playing most afternoons, close enough to Toby’s parents that his mother has already established a habit of dropping by with food I haven’t asked for and don’t have the heart to turn away.
I’ve never lived anywhere with this much ambient noise before, voices carry across the green, someone’s dog barking at nothing, the constant low hum of a community going about its business all around me, and for the first week or two, some wary part of me flinched at all of it.
My body still calibrated for a life where sound means danger more often than it means simply other people existing nearby.
I remember the first night I actually slept through until morning without waking at some ordinary noise outside our window, a door somewhere down the row closing a little too firmly, a child’s laugh carrying farther than expected in the still night air.
I woke that particular morning and realise that I hadn’t startled once and felt something loosen in my chest that had been wound tight for longer than I could measure.
That wariness faded faster than I expected.
Faster than it had faded anywhere else I’ve ever lived.
I credited some of that to Toby and some of it to the sheer density of good, ordinary evidence surrounding me daily.
A community that simply didn’t behave the way danger had always behaved in my life before, patient in the ways that eventually taught my own nervous system a new, calm baseline.
I throw myself into preparing for the cub the way I throw myself into most things I care about, using the nesting instinct as an excuse to finally build the kind of permanent, deliberate home I’ve never once been allowed to build for myself.
Toby indulges every bit of it, hauling lumber for a nursery he insists on building with his own hands despite me pointing out more than once, that plenty of perfectly good furniture exists in stores.
He wants to make it himself. I understand as I watch him work, that this is its own kind of love language for him, the same instinct that once built a second cabin for a mate he hadn’t found yet, now points at a child neither of us has met yet.
“You didn’t have to do all this.” I tell him one evening, watching him sand down a crib rail with the same careful attention he brings to everything.
“I know,” he says. “I wanted to. There’s a difference.”
I start to understand that difference myself over these months.
Wanting to do something and having to do it had always felt identical to me before, every kindness I’ve ever received eventually came with a bill attached, and I learned to brace for the invoice even in moments that should have felt purely good.
Here that bracing is finally starting to ease.
Toby’s love comes without a ledger. So increasingly, does the clan’s.
I find work of my own within the first month, almost by accident.
Idris, the sharp-tongued old woman who told me at the welcome dinner that I’d get triple whatever I missed as a child, turns out to run a small informal school for the clan’s youngest cubs, reading, basic arithmetic,
the kind of lessons that can’t wait for the human school system an hours drive away to catch every child up properly.
She apparently noticed, during some idle conversation at a gathering, that I have a patient, careful way with the children who keeps orbiting the adult’s conversations and bluntly asked me whether I’d consider helping out.
I hadn’t, I hadn’t considered much of anything beyond survival for most of my adult life, and the idea of having a role here, something that’s mine, chosen rather than assigned, takes me a full week to properly say yes to.
I remember sitting with the offer for days, turning it over with a kind of suspicion that has nothing to do with Idris and everything to do with old habits about what happens to women who let themselves want things too openly.
I keep waiting for a catch that never arrives.
It turns out to be exactly what I need. Something to do with my hands and my mind that has nothing to do with fear or vigilance, a room full of children who looks at me like I have answers worth listening to, a purpose that exists independently of being anyone’s mate or anyone’s victim.
I find I’m good at it, better than I expected patient in the particular way that came from having once been a child nobody had been patient with, careful to notice the quiet ones, the ones who hold back the way I always had.
There’s a boy, in particular, maybe six years old, who reminds me so sharply of myself at that age, watchful, careful not to take up too much space, that I find myself gravitating toward him without quite deciding to, offering the small,
steady kindnesses I’d once desperately needed and never quite got.
“You’re a natural,” Idris tells me, more than once, watching me work through some minor cub dispute with a diplomacy I didn’t know I possessed. “Some people just understand children because they remember, clearly, what it was like to need someone who understood them. You’re one of those.”
I hold onto that more than I let on. It’s I realise, the first time in my entire life that anyone has told me my childhood, the hard, lonely parts of it, has made me better at something, rather than simply broken.
The pregnancy itself passes in a steady rhythm of small milestones, the first flutter of movement I felt clearly, the day my belly finally rounded enough that strangers on the rare trip into town started smiling at me with the automatic warmth people reserve for visibly expectant mothers,
the appointment with the clan’s healer where we heard, the strong, steady thrum of a heartbeat that wasn’t my own.
Toby cried at that one, quiet and unguarded, gripping my hand so tight I had to remind him, laughing, that I still needed circulation in my fingers.
“Sorry,” he said, not sounding sorry at all, wiping at his eyes with the back of his free hand. “I just… I didn’t think I’d get any of this. Six years, I told myself I’d made peace with never having it.”
“You don’t have to apologize for being happy.” I’d told him and meant it more than the simple words could really carry.
The clan’s healer, an unhurried older man named Osric who’s apparently delivered half the current generation of cubs himself, explains things to us with a patience didn’t expect, how a cub born to a human mother tends to develop, what signs to watch for,
the fact that most pregnancies proceed entirely normally right up until a birth that runs a little hotter and a little faster than a fully human one, owing to the cub’s shifter blood.
I find the clinical detail oddly comforting rather than frightening.
Knowing the shape of what is coming makes it easier to trust that I can handle it the same way Toby’s plain honesty has always made hard things easier to carry than false reassurance ever could have.
I have my own version of that same disbelief, most days waking up in a warm bed in a home surrounded by people who love me, a cub growing steadily inside a body I once believed existed only to survive whatever was done to it, and finding, again and again,
that none of it dissolves the way good things always used to dissolve in my old life.
It just keeps being true, morning after morning, solid and real and entirely mine to keep.
By the time autumn starts turning the clan’s trees gold, the nursery stands finished, simple, sturdy, exactly the kind of room a man who built things with patience and care would make for a child he already loves completely.
I stand in the doorway some evenings just looking at it, at the crib Toby has sanded smooth with his own hands, at the small shelf of books Priya has passed down from her own children, at a life I once believed simply wasn’t available to someone like me.
I’ve added my own small touches to the room over the weeks, a mobile I made myself out of pressed leaves and thread, clumsy but entirely mine, hangs crooked above the crib in a way Toby has refused to let me straighten, insisting it’s perfect exactly as it is.
A rocking chair his father built decades earlier, passed down without ceremony, worn smooth by generations of clan mothers before me.
I run my hand along its arm some evenings, thinking about all the women who’s sat in this exact chair, rocking children who’s grown up safe and feel, every time, a quiet, humble gratitude at being allowed to add my own chapter to that particular chair’s long history.
“Any regrets?” Toby asks one night, finding me there, arms wrapping easy around me from behind, chin resting against the top of my head.
“None,” I say. “Not one. I used to think safe was something you had to fight for constantly, every single day, or it would disappear the second you looked away. I don’t believe that anymore. I think safe can just be a place you live in. I think that’s what this is.”
He presses a slow kiss to my temple, and neither of us says anything else for a long while, just stand together in the doorway of a room built for someone who hasn’t even arrived yet, already more loved than either of us have words to properly say.