Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
Grayson
Three years later.
The afternoon light off the back lawn is soft gold, late September that’s lost the heat of summer and not yet found the chill of fall. I’m leaning against the patio post with a coffee that’s gone cold in my hand, watching my son let himself be climbed on by my daughter.
Ethan’s seven now, sprawled flat on his back with his arms thrown wide while Anna uses his chest as a mountain to summit.
She’s got her mother’s dark hair, my amber eyes, and at fourteen months, she’s already a benevolent dictator.
Her chubby fists are knotted in the front of Ethan’s shirt as she hauls herself up his torso, grunting with the effort.
Ethan groans theatrically. “Anna, you weigh ten thousand pounds.”
“Dada.”
“I’m not Dada. I’m Ethan.”
“Dada.”
“E. Than.”
“Dada!” she roars in protest.
A laugh shakes out of me from the patio. Ethan tips his head back against the grass to glare at me upside down. “Dad. She’s calling me Dada again.”
“She knows what she’s doing, buddy.”
Anna chooses that moment to plant her palm directly over her brother’s mouth.
Ethan makes a muffled outraged sound. She giggles, delighted with herself, then tips sideways off his chest into the grass without a flicker of worry that the ground won’t be there.
She rolls, giggles again, picks herself up, takes three wobbly steps, and drops back down onto her brother’s stomach.
“Anna. Anna.”
“Dada.”
“I’m going to leave you in the woods.”
“Be nice to your sister, Ethan.” I take a sip of cold coffee.
Ethan moans, and Anna pats his cheek hard enough that the slap is audible.
The screen door clicks open behind me, and Miranda’s voice carries out across the lawn.
“Dinner’s ready. Anna, stop bullying your brother.”
Ethan sits up so fast that Anna nearly goes flying. He catches her on instinct, hooks one arm around her middle, and is on his feet before I’ve lowered my coffee. “Okay, Mom.”
He hoists his sister onto his hip, the same hold he’s watched me use bringing her in from the car, his mouth set in concentration. Anna grabs a fistful of his hair to steady herself and shrieks with laughter at her own cleverness. He winces.
“Easy, easy. My hair’s attached to my head, Anna.”
He marches her past me toward the back door. Anna waves at me over his shoulder, gone shy all at once. I lean down and kiss the top of her head as they pass.
“Hi there, baby girl.”
“Dada.”
“You’re calling all the men Dada now, are you?”
“Dada.”
I follow them inside.
The kitchen smells of roasted garlic and rosemary, under it the faint sweetness that means Miranda’s made her mother’s potato dish, the one she’s only just gotten brave enough to attempt without checking the recipe card every thirty seconds.
She’s at the stove with her back to me, stirring something in a pan, one hand pressed absently to her stomach.
We’re three months along this time, the curve just starting to show under her shirt.
I cross to her on quiet feet and slide my arms around her from behind. My palms find the warm rise of her belly over hers. She tips her head back against my shoulder without turning.
“You scared me.”
“You knew I was coming.”
“I knew you were going to put your cold hands on my stomach.”
I press my mouth to the side of her neck where the mating mark sits, the four-point curve that hasn’t faded in three years and never will.
Her pulse leaps under my lips. The bond between us hums low and warm at the contact, the private current that’s run between my chest and hers since the night I marked her.
“What do you think this one is?” I murmur against her skin.
She gives a quiet laugh. “Ethan’s decided he wants another sister.”
“Has he?”
“He says Anna needs a partner in crime, and his plan to bond with her over hockey hasn’t worked out.”
“She’s fourteen months old.”
“He says she’s shown a real lack of commitment to the sport.”
I laugh into her hair, my hand spreading over the curve of her stomach. There’s no movement yet, too early, but the warmth of her under my palm is enough.
“What do you want?”
She’s quiet a moment. Then her voice drops.
“I’d like a boy this time.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, Grayson.” Her hand finds mine over her stomach. “I’d like a boy this time, and I’d like to name him Gabriel. Gabe. After your brother.”
I don’t move for a second.
I wasn’t ready for that. Bracing for a girl has been easy, or another little tyrant with Ethan’s coloring, or some joke about needing balance in the house. What she actually handed me was my brother’s name, and I have nothing ready for it.
My throat tightens around words that won’t come.
She tips her head against my shoulder so she can see my face. Her eyes have gone careful. “Is that all right?”
“Sweetheart.”
“Grayson.”
“Yes.” My voice has scraped low. “Yes. It’s more than all right. He’d have loved it, loved you for thinking of it.”
“You’re sure?”
“I want our son to have his uncle’s name running around this house.”
She turns in my arms and presses her face into my chest. My arms come up around her, careful of the bump, my mouth against the top of her head. We stand there a long moment. The pan on the stove starts up a low, worried hiss that means whatever’s in it is about to scorch, and neither of us moves.
She finally lifts her head. “The pan.”
“Let it burn.”
“Grayson Wolfe.”
“All right, all right.”
She turns back to the stove and gives the contents a fast stir while I press my forehead to the back of her head and breathe.
“How was work?” I ask when my voice is mine again.
She lets out a tired laugh, finding her feet again. “Still trying to convince a sixty-year-old pack healer from up north that learning to take a blood pressure reading isn’t an insult to her decades of herbal knowledge.”
“How’s that going?”
“She informed me, in front of the entire intake class, that her grandmother could diagnose a kidney infection by smell alone.”
“To be fair.”
“Grayson, I made her sit through the lecture on standardized triage anyway.”
“Did she pass the exam?”
“With ninety-four percent.” Miranda smiles in spite of herself. “And she pulled me aside afterward and told me, very grudgingly, that the blood pressure cuff is useful in certain edge cases. I’ll take that as a win.”
I laugh. She’s run that institute two years now, built it out of her settlement money, and she works it with a clipboard in one hand and zero patience for anyone’s status.
“I still can’t believe you put the whole settlement into the institute.”
“I told you I would.”
“You told me you might. You didn’t mention you’d refuse to keep a single dollar for yourself.”
“Why would I keep it?” She glances at me over her shoulder. “I had everything I needed.”
Something in my chest pulls tight, and she has no idea she’s done it. I press a kiss to the back of her neck.
“You’re a bigger person than I am, Miranda.”
“You’re the one who paid for the building.” She snorts and turns down the burner. “What were you going to do, Grayson? Tell me what your version of the settlement looked like?”
“I wanted to torch Vivian Banks’ career. Axel Hudson I wanted on a no-fly list. And every person at that hospital who ever put your name in a sentence with a slur, I wanted run off this continent.”
“They paid, Ethan.” Her voice has gone steady. “I punished them on my own terms. Those people worked hard to get where they are. I’m not going to take that from them just because they were cruel. Cruelty doesn’t make a person’s whole life forfeit.”
“Axel got you fired.”
“And Axel agreed to a six-figure settlement, a public apology, and mandatory training. He thinks twice now before he hits on a nurse or a female staff member. That’s more change than burning his life down would’ve gotten.”
“You put me to shame, sweetheart.”
“You’re a perfectly fine person. You’ve just got less patience.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
She turns, kisses me on the chin, then pushes me toward the cabinet. “Plates. Four. Anna’s bowl with the lid.”
“Right away, ma’am.”
Dinner’s loud. Ethan tells us a long and increasingly elaborate story about the new boy at school who has apparently challenged him to a race on the ice tomorrow, complete with sound effects and one impassioned hand gesture that knocks over his glass of water.
Anna throws a piece of carrot at him at exactly the right moment to suggest she’s been planning it.
Linda, who’s eating with us tonight because she eats with us every Friday now whether she pretends to want to or not, laughs into her napkin.
After dinner, Linda takes Anna up to give her a bath. Ethan asks if I’ll take him on a walk to the trail because he wants to show me where he saw the deer this morning.
“Sure, buddy.”
“Can we bring sticks?”
“Bring all the sticks you want.”
“Can I bring my hockey stick?” He hops down off his chair and runs to put on his sneakers.
I cross to where Miranda’s started on the dishes and lay my hand against the small of her back.
“I’m going to take him on the walk and stop by Gabriel’s grave on the way back. Do you mind?”
She looks up at me. Her face has gone soft. “Of course not.”
“Half an hour, maybe forty minutes.”
“Take your time, Grayson.”
I kiss her temple and follow my son out the back door.
Ethan kicks at pine cones the whole way down, narrating the deer to me with total seriousness. I half-listen and watch him, the gold afternoon light moving across his hair, the confident swing of his shoulders, the glance he throws back every few yards to check that I’m still behind him.
We sit on the rock above the lake for a while. He shows me the place in the soft mud where the deer’s hoofprints came down to the water. He tells me the deer was a doe with her fawn close by, and he had to stay quiet so he wouldn’t scare them.
“You did the right thing.”
He grins at me, a quick private grin, and tucks his hand into mine for the walk back.