22. Laina
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
LAINA
Iwoke to the realization that my hand had been moving in circles on Brovish’s chest for who knows how long. His heartbeat thrummed beneath my palm, and his breathing had changed from the deep rhythm of sleep to something more aware.
My cheek rested against his ribs. My leg had tangled with his during the night. His arm curved around my waist like it had always belonged there.
Should I pretend I was still asleep?
“You’re thinking,” he said, his voice morning rough.
I tilted my head back to find him watching me, his hair tousled across the pillow making him look unguarded in a way I’d never seen during daylight hours.
“How long have you been awake?” I asked.
“Long enough to wonder if you’d stop touching me when you realized you were doing it.”
My hand had gone motionless on his chest. I made myself continue the circle I’d been tracing. “Is this better or worse?”
His breathing hitched. “Much worse. I didn’t want to move and wake you.”
“I didn’t want to move and end this.”
His hand slid down across my hip, pulling me closer. “We could stay here.”
“We could.”
I slid my fingers along his jaw, gliding across the line of it up to where his tusk emerged.
I kept stroking, learning everything I could about his face and neck. He had morning stubble, making me wonder what a bearded orc would look like. His skin warmed under my touch, and his eyes darkened when I brushed the corner of his mouth.
“Laina.”
“Yes?”
“If you continue that, we’ll be very late for work.”
“Would that be terrible?”
His hand slid from my hip to the small of my back, pressing me flush against him. “No.”
I rose up and kissed him. His mouth opened under mine, and his other hand came up to cup the back of my head, his fingers threading through my hair.
When we finally broke apart, we were both breathing hard.
He kissed me again, softer this time. Then pulled back enough to search my face. His mouth found mine once more in a deeper kiss that made everything spark inside me.
Sunlight hit the windowsill at an angle that made me realize exactly how late it was.
“Oh.” I scrambled up, nearly kneeing him in the process. “What time is it?”
He reached for his phone on the nightstand. “Seven forty-three.”
“We’re supposed to be there at seven.”
“We won’t make it.”
I snorted. “No, we won’t. They’re going to think we…”
He shrugged. “Let them.”
I was already halfway to the bathroom. I brushed my teeth with the toothbrush I’d left on the sink last night and washed my face and tried not to think about how I’d just woken up wrapped around my boss.
Friend.
Whatever this was between us.
When I emerged, he’d put the tea kettle on and was pulling eggs from the refrigerator.
“You don’t have to cook,” I said.
“You need to eat before facing your mother.”
He wasn’t wrong.
I sat at the table and watched him move through his kitchen, cracking eggs into a bowl, heating the pan, and adding butter that sizzled.
He worked with the same careful attention he gave everything.
This was what I’d been running toward when I left the clinic.
Not away from grief or responsibility or my father’s memory but toward someone who made breakfast and gave me his bed and wrote my name in a cherished way in his notebook.
My phone buzzed on the table, and my stomach dropped before I even looked at the screen.
I’ll be there in twenty minutes. –Mom
The eggs Brovish had just set in front of me might as well have been made of cardboard.
He’d cut the toast into triangles. Neat diagonal slices, the way my mother used to do when I was small enough to believe she’d never leave.
Something lodged in my windpipe, and I worried it would never go down.
“My mother will be here in twenty minutes,” I said.
He reached across the table, his hand covering mine. “Then we have nineteen minutes to eat breakfast together.”
“I’m not hungry anymore.”
“I know.” But he didn’t move his hand. “Eat anyway. You’ll need the steadiness.”
He understood that facing my mother required being anchored to something.
I picked up my fork because he was right, and because the eggs were good, rich, and warm. They felt like comfort.
“Thank you,” I said.
“For eggs?”
“For the triangles.” My voice croaked. “And for knowing I needed them.”
We finished breakfast and washed the dishes.
When we were done, he turned to face me, his hands still damp from the sink.
“Whatever happens today with your mother, you’re not alone,” he said.
“You’re right.”
I rose on my toes, and he curled down to meet me for a kiss.
We walked to the main building together. The morning had turned bright and clear. A bloomback grazed near the western fence, its flowers shifting from pale yellow to soft pink as we passed.
Inside, the facility hummed with morning activity. Drogar had brought the fizzlings inside for their supervised static discharge. Krem was rearranging something in the supply room.
Greth appeared from the hallway and nodded once in our direction.
“Cooper’s big day,” Traig said. He sat at the entryway desk, reviewing the schedule on his tablet. “Is he still ready to be released?”
I’d been so focused on my mother’s impending arrival that I’d almost forgotten.
“Let me check on him first,” I said.
Brovish fell into step beside me as I headed out the back door and walked over to Cooper’s pen.
He perched near the top of the enclosure, his feathers catching the morning light. When I approached, he made the soft chiming sound to show he recognized me.
“Good morning,” I said. “Today’s the day. Are you ready?”
He tilted his head, studying me with one pale blue eye.
“I know. It’s a big decision. But your wing is healed, and you’ve been practicing your flights. You’re ready for this.”
“We have a saying about creatures who recover from injury,” Brovish said. “The wing that mends teaches the bird new ways of flying. Healing changes you. You don’t return to what you were. You become something that knows both falling and flight.”
Cooper studied Brovish.
“I think he understands that better than I do,” I said.
Brovish’s hand found mine, our fingers linking.
“You’ll understand it when you’re ready.”
Gravel crunched in the parking lot. My mother had arrived. I went inside the enclosure and gave Cooper one final exam. He was ready, and I gently put him inside his carrier.
By the time we’d gathered everyone in the meadow adjacent to the facility, my mother had joined us in sensible flats and pants that hadn’t collected any mud yet.
She stopped a short distance away, not quite part of the group but not separate either.
Inside his carrier, Cooper shifted his weight, his feathers making quiet music.
“Are we ready?” I asked.
Brovish nodded. “Your decision when.”
I unlatched the door, swinging it open slowly so Cooper could see the sky beyond.
He didn’t move.
My pulse kicked up. What if he wasn’t ready? I could’ve misread the signs and his wing would fail him the moment he tried.
“It’s frightening,” I said softly, as much to myself as to him. “The first time always is.” I stepped back, giving him room. “Your wing knows what to do. You just have to trust it.”
Cooper’s head swiveled from me to the open door and the sky above. His wings rustled, metal feathers chiming like distant bells.
Trust it.
Like I was trusting that leaving my father’s clinic had been the right decision. I was trusting this place, these creatures, and Brovish. Letting my heart realize that all of this was where I belonged instead of where I’d run to.
Cooper stepped to the edge of the carrier.
I grabbed onto my pants, holding tight.
He launched.
His flight wobbled, dipping low enough that my stomach lurched. But he corrected, his wings finding the rhythm they’d lost, and he soared upward. Each beat was stronger than the last. He banked left, circled a few times, climbing higher with each pass.
My neck craned back as I followed his arc across the sky.
When he aimed for the tree line and disappeared into the green, my chest split wide open.
Letting go didn’t mean losing. It meant trusting something—someone—to find their own way home.
When I finally lowered my gaze, I found my mother watching me instead of the sky.
She stared at me as if she was seeing something she’d lost a long time ago and had just now remembered existed.
“That was remarkable,” she said.
“He was ready.”
“I meant you.”
The others went inside.
Brovish squeezed my hand once before following them, leaving me alone with my mother.
She stood with her arms at her sides.
“Would you like to walk?” she asked.
“Just us?”
“Just us.”
We started along the perimeter fence, neither of us speaking. The path was made up of packed dirt winding between enclosures and along the tree line. A mossnibble whistled from somewhere inside their pen. Gerald rumbled in his sleep as we passed.
My mother walked with her hands in her pockets, watching the ground.
“I didn’t come here because I disapproved,” she finally said. “I came because I was frightened.”
I waited.
“When your father and I were married, we rarely had serious conversations. He didn’t like conflict.
I didn’t push even when there were things I needed to say, things I wanted him to hear.
” She kept her eyes on the path ahead. “I’d try to discuss things that mattered, like finances, our future.
He’d disappear, taking late-night calls that could wait.
Or he’d spend hours in the barn fixing things that weren’t broken.
Anywhere but with me, working through the latest problem. ”
The mossnibble’s whistling faded as we walked.
“I got frustrated,” she said. “I pushed harder, thinking if I could make him see how important it was, he’d stay and talk.
But the harder I pushed, the more he backed away.
By the time I realized we needed help, the love was gone.
We were two people living in the same house, avoiding each other in different ways. ”
“So you left,” I said.
“I did.” She stopped walking, turning to face me.
“I wanted to take you with me. But you and Dave were so close. You were like a second version of him. And I was angry at him. I couldn’t see you separately.
I craved city life, restaurants and theaters, and people who’d talk to me instead of running away.
That wasn’t a life for a daughter who loved nature the way you do.
I left you because I loved you, not because I didn’t.
I thought I was giving you the life you needed. ”
“By leaving me behind?”
“I know how it sounds. I know what I did to you.” Her voice cracked.
“Watching you throw yourself into work and avoid anything that might require you to be vulnerable with another person terrifies me. I’ve seen where that leads.
It led your father and me to separate lives in the same house.
And then it led me to leave my daughter behind because I was too broken to fix what I’d helped destroy. ”
We stood facing each other on the path, years of silence between us.
“I’m not avoiding connection,” I said. “I’m building something new here.”
“Are you? Or are you running to another isolated place where you can work yourself to exhaustion and call it living?”
“That’s not fair.”
“Maybe not. I left you once, Laina. I can’t fix that. I can’t go back and make different choices. But I’m here now, trying to make up for it.” She pulled her hands from her pockets. “I’m trying not to lose you again.”
“You’re trying not to lose me again?” The words came out flat. “You lost me when I was eleven, Mom. You don’t get to show up now and act like we can fix that with a walk along a fence.”
My mother flinched, but I couldn’t stop.
“You left me with a man who was so busy avoiding his own pain that he taught me how to do the same thing. And now you’re worried I’m too much like him? You helped make me this way.”
“You’re right,” she said, the words coming out careful. “I did. And I can’t undo that.” She pulled her hands from her pockets, holding them loose at her sides. “I can only try to do better now. If you’ll let me.”
The anger in my chest flickered, guttered.
I’d spent years imagining this conversation, rehearsing all the things I’d say if she ever gave me the chance. Now that I had it, the words felt hollow. She wasn’t asking for forgiveness. She was asking for a chance to walk the distance she’d created.
That was something I could maybe, eventually, give.
The thing about grief is that it doesn’t announce itself. It sits in your chest for years, growing into the empty spaces until you forget what it felt like before it moved in.
My mother wasn’t trying to control me. She was trying to find a bit of the daughter she’d left behind.
“I understand what you’re saying,” I said. “And I appreciate that you’re here, trying. But I need you to understand something too.” I gestured back toward the facility. “I’m not running away. I’m running toward work that means something. I love this place. It’s mine, not inherited.”
“And Brovish?”
“He’s part of what I’m running toward,” I said carefully. “If that’s what you’re asking.”
“Do you love him?”
“I don’t know yet.” I looked at the trees where Cooper had disappeared. “I’m not afraid of finding out.”
“That’s a start.”
“Is it enough?”
“For me? Yes.” She started walking again, and I fell into step beside her. “I’m not expecting perfection, Laina. I’m hoping for honesty. Small steps. Maybe we can try that?”
Tavresh-mora. The space that must be walked.
“I think we can,” I said.
We walked the rest of the perimeter and though the silence between us wasn’t quite comfortable, it was heading in that direction. When we reached the parking area, she pulled her keys from her pocket.
“I should get back to the cottage,” she said. “I need to book a flight. Jerry’s been texting, wondering when I’m coming home.”
“How is he?”
“Persistent. In a good way.” She smiled. “We’re working on things. Trying to talk instead of walking away.”
“That sounds healthy.”
“It is. Most days. You see…I ran away myself. So maybe you got it from both of us.”
I hadn’t thought of it that way.
“When do you plan to leave?” I asked.
“In a few days, if that’s alright. I want to stay and see more of your new life.”
“I’d like that.” This time, when I said it, I actually meant it.
She unlocked the car but turned back. “After I leave, will you call me sometimes?”
“I will.”
She hugged me, quick and awkward, but we were out of practice. When she pulled back, tears gleamed in her eyes.
“You’re doing good work here,” she said. “Your father would be proud. I’m proud.”
“Thank you, Mom. That means a lot.”
She stroked my face and got into her car.
I stood under the overhang and watched her drive away.