Chapter 2: My Good Husband

Lola's POV

Tristain cried in the car.

Not the quiet kind. It was the kind that comes from somewhere deep. His shoulders were  shaking, one hand gripped the steering wheel even though we weren't moving. He had walked me out of Dr. Callum's office with his hand on my back and held it together until the doors closed and then he just broke.

I sat in the passenger seat and watched him.

"Hey." I reached over and touched his arm. "Tristain."

"Don't." His voice was rough. "Don't tell me it's okay."

"I wasn't going to."

He turned to look at me, eyes red, and for a moment he looked so genuinely destroyed that I felt guilty for every small suspicion I had carried into that room. This was my husband. This was the man who had sat beside me through five years of negative tests and never once made me feel like a failure.

He pulled me into his chest and held me so tight I could barely breathe.

"I'm not losing you," he said into my hair. "You hear me? I'm not."

I closed my eyes and whispered, “Thank you, babe. I love you.”

****

The first two weeks after the diagnosis, he was everywhere.

He cancelled two council meetings. He came home before dark every evening and sat with me through dinner and asked what I wanted to watch and brought me water before I could ask for it. He called Dr. Callum himself and spent forty minutes on the phone asking questions I hadn't thought to ask. He made a list. An actual written list, in his handwriting, of every specialist the physician had mentioned.

The pack noticed.

"Your husband called the east ward herbalist on your behalf," my neighbor Mrs. Daisy told me over the fence one morning. "He came himself. He wouldn't send a messenger." She shook her head like she was watching something holy. "That man loves you, Lola."

I nodded.

I folded the compliment away with all the others.

But by the third week, the council meetings came back.

Then the late nights.

Then the silence at dinner that he filled by looking at his phone with the screen tilted just slightly away from me.

"How was the meeting?" I asked one evening.

"Long." He refilled his glass without looking up. "Boundary dispute in the northern corridor. It'll probably run through the weekend."

"The whole weekend?"

"These things don't wrap up cleanly." He finally looked at me and smiled. The same smile. Warm. Unhurried. "You know how the council gets."

I did know. I had sat in enough of those rooms.

"Tristain." I set my fork down. "I want to ask you something."

"Go on, babe."

"Do you think..." I stopped. Started again. "Do you ever feel like things have been different between us? Not because of the diagnosis. Before that."

He was quiet for just a moment too long.

"Different how?"

"Distant. Like you're somewhere else even when you're sitting right in front of me."

He leaned back in his chair and looked at me with something that might have been patience and might have been something else entirely. "Lola. You've just been told you're seriously ill. Your mind is going to look for problems even where there aren't any. That's normal."

"I'm not imagining distance, Tristain."

"I didn't say you were imagining it. I said your mind is under enormous pressure right now." His voice was so reasonable. So calm. "I'm here, aren't I? I came home tonight. I'm sitting at this table."

He said it like showing up was the whole of what love required.

I picked my fork back up.

I said nothing else.

****

Two days later he came home with a baby.

I heard the car first, then the front door, then his voice low in the hallway speaking to someone... no, to something. A small, fragile sound underneath his voice that stopped me at the top of the stairs.

I came down slowly.

He was standing in the living room holding a newborn wrapped in a white blanket, the baby's face turned into his chest. He looked up when he heard my footsteps.

"Before you say anything..." he started.

"Where did that baby come from?"

"She was found at the south border this morning. One of the gate wolves brought her to me directly." He adjusted her in his arms, his movements careful and practiced in a way that made something cold move through me. "There was no note. No scent trail. Nothing."

I came off the last step slowly. "And you brought her here."

"She had nowhere to go, Lola. The pack holding facility… you know what that place is like."

I did know. I had spent time in the pack's version of one as a child.

I crossed the room and looked at the baby properly for the first time. She was small and pink and her eyes were shut and she smelled...

I stopped breathing for a second.

She smelled clean. Too clean. Like she had been bathed recently, with good soap, the kind you bought from a proper store. Not like a baby who had been left at a border gate in the morning cold.

"She was abandoned," I said slowly.

"Yes."

"At the gate."

"Yes, my luna."

I looked at him. "Tristain, who abandons a newborn this clean?"

He looked back at me steadily. "Someone desperate."

I wanted to push further. My wolf was already pacing, circling something she could smell but couldn't see. But the baby shifted in his arms just then and let out a sound so small and helpless that my chest cracked clean open.

I reached out before I could stop myself.

"Give her to me."

He hesitated... just for a second, barely a breath... then placed her in my arms.

She settled against me immediately. Her tiny fist curled around the fabric of my shirt and held on.

And Tristain watched me hold her with an expression on his face that I would not understand until much later.

That night he sat across from me at dinner and said it casually, between bites, like it was a simple thing.

"I think we should keep her."

I looked up.

"Adopt her," he said. "Give her a real home. Give you something..." He paused carefully. "Something to pour into. While you still have the time and the strength."

The room went very quiet.

While you still have the time.

I set my glass down.

"I'll think about it," I said.

He nodded like that meant yes.

And maybe it did. Because later that night I stood in the doorway of the guest room where the baby slept and I watched her chest rise and fall, and I felt something move through me that I hadn't felt in five years.

Hope.

Which was exactly what he was counting on.

My phone buzzed on the dresser behind me.

A message from a number I didn't recognize.

She's back in the States. She landed this morning.

I stared at it.

Before I could make sense of it, the baby stirred and began to cry, and I crossed the room to her without thinking, lifting her into my arms, shushing her softly.

She stopped crying the moment I held her.

I looked down at her face in the low light.

And for the first time I thought about how much she looked like him.