Chapter 8
Decklan
She never went back to the rental car.
I drove her down to the trailhead to get it—she tried to pay the late fee herself and I put my card down first—and we transferred her bag to my truck and I watched her look at the rental office a second longer than she needed to. Then she turned to me. Then she got in my truck.
Her stuff arrived in three boxes two weeks later.
She had a storage unit in Spokane with furniture she didn’t care about and a lease she’d already broken.
She’d half decided on Bozeman for the winter.
She moved to Harlow instead and she acts like this is perfectly obvious and I’m the one making it strange by mentioning it.
She’s not wrong.
My cabin is small. It’s built for one person living alone who doesn’t think about what a kitchen looks like to someone else.
She rearranged it the second week—asked before she did it, which she didn’t have to, and I said “whatever you want,” which she took seriously.
The kitchen makes more sense now. There are plants on the windowsill.
There’s a coffee maker that isn’t just a percolator and a shelf above it with mugs that aren’t all the same size.
It looks like a place where two people live.
My wolf has not been agitated in six weeks. This is a record.
I call Eli at the end of the second week. He picks up on the third ring and says my name and then doesn’t say anything else for a second. Neither do I. We haven’t spoken in three years. I don’t know how to start.
“I found my mate,” I say. That starts it.
We talk for an hour. Eli has—a lot happened in three years.
He mated a Strand, which is a sentence I make him say twice.
Nina. The alpha’s youngest sister, the human one, and the truce that came out of it, and the Tuesday dinners he now sits through across a table from Kieran Strand every week like it’s normal.
He says Nate put the scent line in writing. He says Rhett asked after me twice.
I listen to all of it and he listens to mine, and at the end he says “bring her down to Harlow sometime” and I say “we’re already here.” He’s quiet. Then he says “Decklan,” and I hear everything in it that neither of us knows how to say.
Gemma is in the kitchen making terrible coffee when I hang up. She looks at me over her shoulder. She knows who I called. “Well?”
“He wants to meet you.”
She grins. The whole-room grin. “Obviously.” She pours two mugs, hands me mine, goes up on her toes and kisses my jaw. “I already knew you’d fix it.”
“You knew no such thing.”
“I had strong feelings about it.” She pats my chest. “Same thing.”
The weeks go by in a way I didn’t know weeks could go.
She walks the trails with me on my off-days.
She’s gotten good—her pack fits right now, her footing is solid, she stops when I tell her to stop and she hasn’t needed to be told twice since the second week.
She still talks constantly. I still listen to every word.
I’ve started talking back, which is the real change.
Gemma asks me things and I find I have answers.
I give them. She listens with her whole body turned toward me, and I keep going.
She sets up her work in the corner of the living room.
Laptop, a second monitor she ordered, a whiteboard she put up without asking—I walked in and she had a level and a pencil line and a look that dared me to say something.
I didn’t say anything. The whiteboard now has a full event timeline on it for a corporate retreat in Missoula, color-coded, with a list of vendors and a running risk log.
She calls it “just a dry run,” her first job from Harlow.
The client doesn’t know her planner is logging calls from a wolf shifter’s mountain cabin.
Probably they don’t need to. She handles a supplier crisis on a Tuesday while wearing my flannel shirt and eating cereal, voice completely calm.
Two vendor calls in the same half hour. Same way she ran the trail.
Forward. Whatever it takes. No drama about it after.
I’ve been cutting timber for ten days on my days off. Ash. Good grain. She’s noticed the off-cuts stacking in the workshop but hasn’t asked.
She finds me at three in the morning.
I’m in the workshop with the crib half-sanded, fine sandpaper in both hands, working the curve of the headboard.
I didn’t hear her come in—she’s gotten good at quiet when she wants to be.
When I look up she’s in the doorway in my flannel shirt and her wool socks, hair loose, staring at what I’ve built.
I set the sandpaper down.
“Decklan,” she says. Very quiet.
“The grain is difficult at the curve,” I say. “I’ve been doing the ends in pieces.”
She doesn’t say anything. She crosses the workshop in her sock feet and stands in front of the crib and runs her hand along the slat I finished yesterday. Her hands are shaking slightly.
“How long have you known?” she asks.
“Two weeks.”
Her head comes up. She looks at me. “Two weeks.”
“I could hear it.” I hold her gaze. “Second heartbeat. Small. Faster than yours.”
She stares at me for a long moment. She’ll tell me what’s on her face when she’s ready. She always tells me everything eventually.
Then she says: “You could have said something.”
“I wanted to build this first.”
She looks back at the crib. Her hand still on the slat. Something moves through her face—counting, maybe. Two weeks of mornings. Two weeks of coffee and trails and her talking and me listening. Two weeks she didn’t know.
“You heard it,” she says. “For two whole weeks.”
“Yeah.”
“And you didn’t say anything.” She’s working it out. “You just—came out here every night.” She looks at the sawdust on the floor. The ash shavings around the base of the stool. “Decklan.”
“I wasn’t ready to tell you until I had something to show you.”
She makes a sound—almost a laugh, almost not—and presses the back of her hand to her mouth for a second. Then she lowers it.
“Two weeks,” she says again, softer. “You’ve been carrying that for two weeks.”
“It wasn’t a burden.”
“I know.” She turns and looks at me. Her eyes are bright. “That’s not what I meant. I meant—you knew before I did. And instead of waking me up with it you just—” She gestures at all of it. The crib, the ash grain, the sandpaper folded on the stool. “You built something.”
“Yeah.”
“You built a crib.”
“Yeah.”
She stands there for a long moment. The workshop is very quiet. My wolf settled. Watching her the way it’s watched her since the parking lot.
“That’s the most you thing you could possibly have done,” she says finally. Quiet. Certain.
I don’t have words for what that does to me. I don’t answer.
Another long silence. Her hand still on the slat. The workshop smells like ash and sawdust and her—she always smells like her, like mine.
“You’re going to be a good dad,” she says. Very quiet. Like she’s sure.
I pull her toward me. She comes easy, no resistance, and I settle her in my lap on the workshop stool. She tucks her head under my chin. We sit in front of the half-finished crib in the three AM dark, and neither of us says anything.
She goes quiet on her own. The first time, maybe, that she’s gone quiet without me asking. Just settles into the silence and stays there.
Her hand finds mine. Covers it.
“Harlow is nice,” she says, eventually.
“Yeah.”
“I think my stuff looks good in your kitchen.”
“It does.”
“Good.” She squeezes my hand. “I like it here.”
“I know.” I bend and kiss her hair where it’s loose against my chest. “I know you do.”
Outside the window the mountain is dark.
In a few hours the sky will go grey and then pink and the varied thrush will start up in the tree line—that rising whistle she knows by name now, the one she points out every time.
She’ll wake up when it starts, like she always does, and roll over and say “there he is” like she’s greeting an old friend.
She moved here for a man who barely speaks. She fills every silence. He listens to every word.
I rest my chin on her hair and look at the crib—the ash grain, the curve I’ve been working all week. The woman I’ve been listening to for six weeks. The second heartbeat I’ve been hearing for two. The phone call with Eli. The plants on the windowsill. All the mugs that aren’t matching.
I’ve got nothing left to be restless about. Everything I want is in this room.