Chapter 38 Andrea
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Andrea
I took Finneas to Bonalisa on a Saturday because I’d been back in Atlanta for two weeks without seeing Mary and Peter, and the guilt was starting to feel physical.
The bell above the door chimed when we walked in. Mary was behind the counter sorting intake forms and she looked up and her face just crumpled. She came around the counter so fast she knocked a stack of papers off the edge and didn’t stop to pick them up, just crossed the floor and grabbed me.
“Five minutes,” she said into my shoulder. “I’m hugging you for five minutes. You’re not allowed to talk or move.”
“Mary...”
“Clock started.”
I held her back. She smelled like dog shampoo, the cheap coffee she kept behind the register, and my chest ached because I’d missed this. Missed her, missed the shelter and the animals and the uncomplicated warmth of a place where nobody expected me to navigate wolf politics or pack councils.
Peter appeared from the back room. His eyes went red the second he saw me and he wrapped both arms around Mary and me at the same time, the three of us standing in the entrance of the shelter holding each other while a tabby cat watched from the counter with complete disinterest.
Finneas hung back by the door. He waited until the hugging was done, then nodded at Peter and shook his hand.
Mary looked him up and down. “You look less miserable than last time.”
“Thank you?”
“Still not a compliment. But you’ve got color in your face. You eating?”
“Andrea feeds me.”
“I do not feed him,” I said. “He feeds himself. He learned to cook.”
Mary’s eyebrows shot up. She looked at him, then at me, then back at him. “You cook now.”
“Pasta, mostly.”
“Is it good?”
“It’s...” I searched for the right word. “Adequate.”
“She said it was genuinely good,” Finneas said. “At dinner. She used the word genuinely.”
“I was being polite.”
“You’ve never been polite to me a day in your life.”
Mary was watching us like a tennis match, her eyes bouncing back and forth. The grin spreading across her face was unmistakable: a woman who had been right about everything from the beginning, savoring every second of it.
“Don’t,” I said to her.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Your face is saying plenty.”
He helped without being asked, the way he always did here.
Walked the dogs, refilled the water stations, held a kitten while I caught up with Mary in the back.
He was better at it than he used to be. The kitten was draped across his forearm like a furry scarf and he wasn’t flinching, which was progress from the man who once held a cat like it was a live grenade.
I watched him through the doorway while Mary talked, watched him scratch behind the kitten’s ears with his thumb while he checked water bowls, and my stomach did a slow flip that had nothing to do with the pregnancy.
I was telling Mary about Whitebrook, the therapy group, the scan, when she said it. Casually, mid-sentence, like she was commenting on the weather.
“By the way, the new x-ray machine came in last week. Tell Finneas thanks again for us.”
I stopped mid-sentence. “What x-ray machine?”
Mary blinked. “The digital one. And the ultrasound.” She tilted her head. “Wait. He didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“I assumed he would have used it as ammunition by now. Man funds an entire shelter for the love of his life and doesn’t even brag about it?
That’s either saint behavior or insanity.
” She set her coffee down and looked at me like she was deciding how much to say.
“He called me a few months ago. Said he wanted to make sure Bonalisa was taken care of regardless of what happened between you two. Paid off the lease, covered both our salaries, funded all the medical upgrades. Peter cried. I almost cried. The cats didn’t care. ”
I stared at her. “He funded the entire shelter.”
“Permanently. No strings, no conditions, no naming rights. He didn’t even want us to tell you.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“He asked me not to. And honestly? The man was clearly losing his mind over you. Keeping his one secret felt like the least I could do.”
I sat there processing it while Mary watched me with that look she got when she was trying not to say something she was definitely going to say.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re making the face.”
“What face?”
“The ‘I told you so’ face.”
“I don’t have an ‘I told you so’ face.” She picked her coffee back up. “But if I did, I’d be making it right now.”
In the car on the drive home, I waited until we were on the highway. The city was blurring past the window, familiar streets I’d memorized during two years of living here, and I watched them go by while the question built in my chest.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the shelter?”
He glanced at me. “It wasn’t about credit. You love that place. I wanted it to be safe whether you were there or not.”
“Whether I came back to you or not.”
“Yes.”
I looked out the window. “You’re making it very difficult to maintain my position.”
“What position?”
“The one where I’m still mad at you.”
“That’s not why I did it.”
“I know.” I was quiet for a beat. “That’s what makes it worse.”
Back at the estate I fell asleep on the library couch after dinner. I didn’t mean to. The drive, the emotions, the baby pressing against every organ I owned, all of it hit me at once and I was out before I finished the chapter I was reading.
I woke up to a voice. Low, quiet, close. Not talking to me.
“...and your mom is going to read to you every night. She does voices. They’re terrible but you’ll love them.”
I kept my eyes closed. Finneas was beside me on the couch, my feet in his lap, and he was talking to my belly. His hand was resting on the bump, his thumb moving in slow circles, and his voice was barely above a whisper.
“She’s going to teach you to be brave. She’s the bravest person I know. She walked into a room full of wolves today and didn’t flinch. She’ll probably have you doing the same by the time you’re five.”
My throat tightened. I kept my breathing even.
“I’m going to be there for everything. First word, first step, first time you need someone at three in the morning. I’ll be there.” His thumb paused on my belly. “I won’t be my father. I promise you that.”
The baby fluttered against his hand, a soft movement I felt from the inside, and I heard Finneas exhale, shaky, the way he breathed when something hit him harder than he expected.
I kept my eyes closed because if I opened them he’d stop talking and I didn’t want him to stop. I lay there listening to him make promises to our son in the quiet library with his hand on my belly and his voice cracking on words he’d never say to anyone who was awake.
That night I lay in the guest room staring at the ceiling. The peonies on the nightstand were wilting, petals curling at the edges, and I should have thrown them out days ago but I kept not doing it. The baby was pressing against my ribs, my back hurt, the bed was comfortable, and I couldn’t sleep.
I rolled onto my side and stared at the door. Thirty feet of hallway between this bed and his. I’d been sleeping in this room for two weeks, alone, with my hand on my belly, telling myself I was fine. I was fine. Co-parenting. Boundaries. Walls.
But I wasn’t fine. I was lying in a guest room in a house full of people who could hear a pin drop from three floors away, and the only person I wanted next to me was at the other end of the hall, probably awake too, probably staring at his own ceiling, probably thinking about the same thirty feet I was thinking about.
I was tired. Not just physically, though the pregnancy was handling that.
I was tired of being careful. Tired of measuring every inch of closeness I allowed, of monitoring my own feelings like they were a security risk.
Tired of waking up at three in the morning reaching for someone who wasn’t there because I’d decided he shouldn’t be.
He’d talked to my belly tonight. Made promises to our son he didn’t know I heard. And I could keep lying here pretending that didn’t wreck me, or I could get up.
I got up. Put on my robe over my pajamas. Opened the door, walked down the hall, thirty feet of hardwood under my bare feet, and stood in front of his door.
I knocked.
I heard footsteps, then the door opened.
He was in sweatpants and nothing else, his hair messy from the pillow, and my brain short-circuited for a second because I’d forgotten what he looked like without a shirt.
Or maybe I hadn’t forgotten, maybe I’d just been very carefully not thinking about it.
The broad shoulders, the chest, the ridged abs that caught the hallway light, the dark trail of hair below his navel disappearing into the waistband.
He looked like he’d been carved out of something and then left slightly rumpled.
He looked at me and I watched his face go through concern, then hope, then careful restraint, all in about two seconds. I pulled my eyes back up to his face, which he definitely noticed, and I refused to acknowledge it.
“I don’t want to sleep alone tonight,” I said.
He stepped aside without a word. I walked in. His room smelled like him, clean, warm, that scent underneath that made my whole body relax in a way I couldn’t control. His bed was bigger than mine and the sheets were rumpled on one side because he’d been lying awake too.
I climbed in. He got in beside me, careful, giving me space I didn’t ask for. I rolled onto my side with my back to him, reached behind me, grabbed his arm, and pulled it over my waist.
His chest pressed against my back. His hand settled on my belly and the baby kicked against his palm immediately, hard, like he’d been waiting.
“He knows you’re here,” I said.
“He kicks harder when I’m close.”
“He has opinions.”
“He gets that from you.”
“Everything good about him will be from me. Everything stubborn will be from you.”
“Those are the same thing.”
I almost laughed. His breath was warm on the back of my neck, his hand wide on my belly, and I could feel the tension in his body, the effort of holding still, of not pulling me closer than I’d invited him to be.
Neither of us slept. We talked instead, quiet, his mouth close to my hair.
About the baby, about names, about the nursery he wanted to start setting up.
About Buddy, who had tried to follow me upstairs and been intercepted by the night staff.
About nothing important and everything that mattered, two-in-the-morning talking where the dark makes honesty easier.
Then I asked about something I’d noticed that morning. His jacket was draped over the back of a kitchen chair and a corner of pink paper was sticking out of the pocket. I’d almost pulled it out before catching myself.
“What’s the pink paper in your jacket pocket?”
He was taken aback, his body stiffened for a second before going back to its relaxed state. “A Post-It.”
“What Post-It?”
“The one you left on my coffee mug. ‘Third cup. Don’t push it.’”
I went still against him. That Post-It was from months ago, back when we were still dancing around each other at the office. A joke I’d scrawled in pink ink about his caffeine intake.
“You kept that?”
“It was in my desk drawer the entire time you were gone. I used to take it out and hold it.” He paused. “That sounds insane when I say it out loud.”
“It sounds extremely pathetic.”
“It was extremely pathetic. I was a man running a multi-million dollar company, sitting in the dark holding a sticky note about coffee.”
“In your defense, it was a well-written sticky note.”
“It had five words on it.”
“Quality over quantity.”
I closed my eyes, smiling against the pillow.
He’d moved it from his desk drawer to his jacket pocket.
He carried it every day, close enough that I’d spotted the pink corner sticking out that morning.
A Post-It I’d written in three seconds without thinking, and he’d been holding onto it like a lifeline.
“You carry it everywhere,” I said.
“Every day.”
I laughed, quiet, and his arm pulled me closer. The baby kicked again, a flutter, gentle, settling down. The room was dark, warm. His chest was solid against my back.
I rolled over to face him. His face was close, inches away, his eyes dark in the low light. I could see the scar on his eyebrow, the stubble along his jaw, the way his amber eyes caught what little light there was.
“I’m still scared,” I said.
He didn’t rush to answer. He looked at me, taking the words seriously instead of brushing them away.
“Of what?”
“Of this. Of letting you back in. Of trusting you and being wrong again.” I swallowed. “I kissed you last night and my first thought this morning was ‘what if he does it again’ and I hate that my brain does that. But it does.”
“Andrea...”
“I’m not saying it to make you feel guilty. I’m saying it because it’s true and you should know.”
He was quiet. His hand was on my belly, the baby still against his palm now, settled.
“I’ll be here until you’re not scared anymore,” he said. “If that takes a year, or five, or the rest of our lives, I’ll still be here.”
“That’s a big promise.”
“I’ve broken bigger ones. I’d rather spend the rest of my life proving this one than break another.”
I looked at him. His face was open, unguarded, the face he only showed me when nobody else was watching. I believed him. Believing him was terrifying because the last time I believed him I ended up on a bathroom floor in Whitebrook with a positive pregnancy test and a broken heart.
But lying here with his hand wrapped around me and his breath on my face, I believed him anyway.
I tucked my face into his neck and closed my eyes. His arm pulled me closer, carefully, around the belly. His chin rested on the top of my head.
I slept. Better than I had in months. Deep, heavy, dreamless, with his heartbeat against my forehead and his hand on our son and thirty feet of hallway reduced to nothing.