Chapter 33 Finneas
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Finneas
The café on Main Street had wooden tables, a chalkboard menu, and a woman behind the counter who called everyone “honey” regardless of age, rank, or the fact that the man at table four was a Lycan King trying to approve a border patrol rotation over a latte with a foam heart in it.
I’d been here every morning for two weeks. Same table by the window, same laptop, same stack of reports I printed at the hotel’s business center because the café’s Wi-Fi was unreliable and I didn’t trust it with pack documents. My phone buzzed for the third time in ten minutes and I picked up.
“What.”
“Good morning to you too,” Luca said. “The council is restless. Aldric is making noises about a formal session.”
“Let him make noises.”
“Finn, I can handle the day-to-day but there are decisions that need the King’s signature. The border patrol rotation is overdue, the housing allocation from last month hasn’t been approved, and there’s a formal complaint from the Webber family about your boundary ruling.”
“I made the ruling in person before I left. They can appeal to the council.”
“They don’t want the council. They want you.”
“Tell them I’m unavailable.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes.”
Luca was quiet for a bit before he asked, “How is she?”
“She’s talking to me. Letting me come to breakfast. She let me go to the doctor with her last week.”
“That’s progress.”
“She still says no when I ask her out.”
“Every day?”
“Every day.”
“And you keep asking.”
“Every day.”
He laughed, just once, under his breath. “You know, if the council could see their King right now, sitting in some small-town café getting rejected every morning, they’d lose it.”
“Good thing they can’t see me.”
“Aldric can barely handle you being gone. If he found out you were chasing a five-foot-three human across the state, he’d file a formal challenge on principle.”
“Nobody’s filing anything.”
“You’re deflecting.”
“I’m deflecting. How’s the pack?”
We talked for another twenty minutes. I approved the border patrol rotation, signed off on the housing allocation through a secure email Luca set up, and dealt with a territorial dispute between two betas that should have been resolved locally but escalated because nobody wanted to make decisions while the King was absent.
I hung up and the woman behind the counter refilled my coffee without being asked.
She was maybe mid-thirties, dark curly hair, and she’d been making increasingly obvious excuses to come to my table for the past week.
Extra napkins I didn’t need. A pastry sample she insisted I try.
This morning she leaned against the edge of the table and smiled.
“So, you’ve been our regular every morning for two weeks. You’re new in town?”
“Visiting.”
“Visiting who? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Someone.”
“Someone special?”
I looked up from the laptop. She was pretty.
She was smiling at me in a way that was clear and uncomplicated and if I were a different man, in a different situation, I might have smiled back.
But the only smile I wanted to earn was attached to a woman with green eyes and a dimple on the right side of her face who was currently refusing to go on a date with me.
“I’m here to get the love of my life back,” I said. “She’s not speaking to me yet, but I’m working on it.”
The woman blinked, then laughed. “Well, that’s not the answer I was expecting.” She picked up the coffee pot. “She’s lucky.”
“I’m the lucky one. If she’ll have me.”
She nodded once, refilled my cup, and went back to the counter. She stopped flirting after that, but she kept refilling my coffee, which I appreciated.
I closed the laptop at nine and drove to the house.
Andrea was leaving for her walk when I pulled up.
She was in sneakers and a light jacket, her hair pulled back, and she looked up when she heard the car.
She didn’t wave, didn’t smile, just glanced at me and kept walking.
But she didn’t scowl either, and two weeks ago she wouldn’t have looked at all.
I watched her walk down the sidewalk. She moved differently here than she did in Atlanta, slower, looser, like the tension she’d carried in her shoulders at the office had finally let go.
Her face had more color. She looked healthy, rested.
Every time I saw her I had to fight the urge to close the distance between us because she was right there, twenty feet away, beautiful, pregnant with my child, not mine anymore.
The ache of that never got easier no matter how many mornings I showed up.
The porch step had been bothering me since the first morning.
It dipped and creaked when you stepped on it, the wood soft at the edges where moisture had gotten in.
Andrea walked over it every morning on her way out and every morning I watched it bend under her weight and thought about the fact that one bad step could send her falling, pregnant, onto concrete.
I went to the hardware store after breakfast, bought lumber and nails, and came back. Andrea had left for her walk. Her grandmother was in the kitchen.
“What’s all that?” she asked, looking at the wood under my arm.
“The porch step is rotting. I’m going to replace it.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“I know.”
She followed me outside with her coffee and watched me set up. I knelt on the porch, pulled the old board loose, measured the replacement against the gap. It didn’t fit. I measured again. Still didn’t fit. I could feel her watching me from the doorway.
“You’ve done this before?” she asked.
“How hard can it be?”
“Mmhm.” She came outside, set her coffee on the railing, and crouched beside me. “Give me that.” She took the pencil from behind my ear and marked the cut line. “You’re measuring from the wrong edge. The gap is wider on the left because the frame has warped. You need to account for that.”
I looked at the mark she’d made. She was right.
“My husband built half this porch,” she said. “I watched him make every mistake you could make. By the time he finished I could have done it better myself.” She straightened up and picked her coffee back up. “Cut on that line. And hold the hammer higher up the handle. You’re choking it.”
I adjusted my grip. She nodded.
“Better. Still wrong, but better.”
I spent the morning on the porch step while she supervised from the doorway, correcting my technique with the patient bluntness of a woman who had been watching men fail at home repairs for fifty years.
“You’re going to split the wood if you keep hitting it at that angle.”
“I’ve got it.”
“You don’t have it. Angle the nail.”
“I am angling it.”
“More. Like you’re aiming for the corner, not the center.”
I adjusted. The nail went in clean. She made a sound that might have been approval.
“Your husband taught you all this?” I asked.
“Harold taught me what not to do. I figured out the rest myself.” She sipped her coffee. “He was a terrible handyman. Best man I ever knew, but terrible with tools. I used to wait until he left for work and redo everything he’d fixed the night before.”
“Did he know?”
“Of course he knew. He wasn’t stupid. He just liked the ritual of it. He’d fix something, I’d fix his fix, and neither of us said a word about it. Forty-two years of that.” She sighed, and I knew she was reminiscing. “I miss the ritual more than the fixes.”
I hammered the last nail and sat back on my heels. The step was solid under my hand when I pressed it.
“Not bad,” she said. She came out and tested it with her foot, pressing down hard, shifting her weight side to side. “It’ll hold.”
“Thank you for the help.”
“You did the work. I just told you how to do it correctly.” She paused at the door, her hand on the frame. “There’s a lightbulb out in the hallway upstairs. I can’t reach it.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“And the water heater makes a noise when the hot water runs.”
“I’ll look at it.”
She went inside. I sat on the new step and looked at the street and understood what was happening.
She wasn’t giving me chores because she couldn’t find someone else.
She was handing me pieces of her house, one task at a time, letting me touch the place where Andrea grew up.
Each broken thing she pointed me toward was an inch of trust I hadn’t earned yet but was being given the chance to.
I replaced the lightbulb. I looked at the water heater, which turned out to be the pressure valve like she’d guessed, and I fixed it with a wrench and a YouTube tutorial on my phone while crouched in a closet that smelled like laundry detergent.
I tightened the fence post with a brace I built from scrap wood.
None of it was glamorous. None of it was what a King was supposed to spend his time doing.
But every task she gave me kept me in this house a little longer, and I was willing to fix every broken thing in Whitebrook if it meant being close to Andrea while I did it.
That evening she invited me to stay for dinner. Not breakfast, which I’d been eating with them every morning, but dinner. The meal where they sat down together at the dining table with cloth napkins and talked about their day. Breakfast was functional. Dinner was family.
“Pot roast,” she said. “You eat meat?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Good. Set the table. Plates are in the cabinet above the sink.”
I set the table. Andrea came down from her room and stopped in the kitchen doorway when she saw three plates instead of two.
“He’s staying for dinner,” she called from the stove without looking up.
“I can see that.” She looked at me. I looked at her. She pulled out her chair and sat down.
The pot roast was the best thing I’d eaten since I left Atlanta.
We ate at the dining table with cloth napkins she’d pressed, a small vase of garden flowers in the center.
She told me about the roof tiles that needed replacing, the neighbor’s dog that kept digging under the fence, the church choir that had lost its tenor.
“Am I the only person in this town who can carry a tune? Mrs. Patterson claims she’s an alto but that woman has been sharp for thirty years. I’ve been too polite to say anything.”
“You’ve been too polite?” Andrea said. “Since when?”
“I’m polite when it serves me.”
“Grandma, you’ve never been polite a day in your life.”
“I’m polite when it serves me.”
“That’s called manipulation.”
“It’s called experience.”
I watched them banter across the table, the ease of it, the rhythm of two people who had been doing this for years.
Grandmother and granddaughter, the last two members of a family that used to be bigger, eating dinner together the way they’d done every night since Andrea came home.
I was sitting in the space that used to be empty, the third chair at a two-person table, and neither of them had told me to leave.
“You’re quiet,” Andrea said to me.
“Just listening.”
“That’s new.”
“I’m a good listener.”
“Since when?”
“I’ve been listening to you for over two years. I think that qualifies.”
Andrea opened her mouth, closed it, narrowed her eyes. Across the table, the look that passed between grandmother and granddaughter said more than I could read.
“You want the pot roast recipe?” she asked me.
“I’d love it.”
“You earn it.”
“How do I earn it?”
“That’s for me to decide.”
Andrea snorted into her glass and tried to cover it with a cough. I caught it. The woman across the table caught it. Nobody acknowledged it.
After dinner I helped clear the table. Andrea washed, I dried.
We stood at the sink side by side, her hands in the water, mine on the towel.
She had a way of doing dishes that was exactly how she did everything, efficient, no wasted movement, a little aggressive with the scrubbing.
Her sleeves were pushed up to her elbows, her hair falling out of the clip she’d put it in for dinner, and I could see the curve of her neck when she bent over the sink and I wanted to press my mouth against it so badly my hands ached around the towel.
Her elbow bumped mine when she passed a plate. She didn’t move away. She didn’t lean in either, but the absence of retreat was everything.
“You’re not terrible at drying dishes,” she said without looking at me.
“High praise.”
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
“Too late.”
The corner of her mouth twitched. She handed me the last plate, pulled the plug on the drain, dried her hands on a towel. For a second we stood there in the kitchen, close enough that I could smell her shampoo, the vanilla one, and my chest ached with the familiarity of it.
“Goodnight, Finneas.”
“Goodnight, Andrea.”
I dried the last plate, put it away, said goodnight to both of them.
Drove back to my hotel room, sat on the bed, pulled out the ultrasound photo I kept in my wallet.
My wolf was quiet in my chest, present, warm.
Not frantic, not pushing. Just there, patient, trusting that showing up every day was enough.
I turned off the light, lay in the dark, and thought about Andrea’s arm brushing mine at the sink.
She didn’t move away.
For now, that was enough.