Chapter 3: The Strange Visit

Lola's POV

Sofia looked exactly the same.

That was the first thing I noticed when she walked through the arrivals door at the pack district café where we had agreed to meet. She had the same easy smile, the same unhurried way of moving through a room like she belonged in every part of it. Years abroad had added something polished to her. New clothes. New confidence. But the same Sofia.

She saw me and her face opened up.

"Lola." She crossed the room fast and pulled me into a hug that lasted long enough to feel real. I held on. I had missed her in the specific, aching way you miss the one person who knew you before you became whoever you are now. The orphanage. The cold mornings. The two of us sharing a blanket that wasn't big enough for one.

"Look at you," she said, pulling back, hands on my shoulders. "You look tired."

"Thank you," I said drily.

She laughed. "I didn't mean it like that."

We sat. I had sent her pictures of the baby the night before, the way you share things with someone you consider a sister... without thinking, without editing, just look at this new thing in my life. She replied with three words. She's so cute. No exclamation mark. No follow-up question. I had noticed it and told myself I was reading into nothing.

The waiter brought our food and we fell into the rhythm of catching up the way old friends do, filling in the years with the highlights, skipping the parts that were too heavy for a first afternoon together.

But the pictures were on the table between us.

Sofia hadn't touched them.

"You haven't looked at the photos," I said.

"I saw them last night." She speared something on her plate. "She's really beautiful."

"You didn't ask anything about her."

"I figured you'd tell me what you wanted to tell me." She smiled. "You always did things on your own timeline."

That was true. That had always been true. I let it settle and reached for my drink.

Then the door opened behind me and Sofia's eyes moved there before the bell above it had finished ringing.

I turned.

Tristain walked in.

He stopped when he saw us, like he hadn't expected me to notice immediately. Then he smiled, wide and easy, spreading his arms.

"I thought that was your car outside." He came over and kissed the top of my head, then turned to Sofia. "You made it."

"I made it," she said.

They did not hug. They did not shake hands. They just looked at each other for three seconds. 

"I won't interrupt," Tristain said, turning back to me. "I just came to grab something. Don't rush home." He squeezed my shoulder. "Enjoy your afternoon, my love."

He left.

I watched him go.

Then I turned back to Sofia.

She was already looking at the photos.

****

She came home with me that evening.

I hadn't planned it. She had asked to see the baby in person and I had said yes because saying no would have required an explanation I didn't yet have. We pulled into the driveway and I carried the baby down from the nursery and placed her in Sofia's arms in the living room.

What happened next I have replayed many times since.

The baby had been fussy all afternoon. Refusing to settle. The nanny had tried feeding her, rocking her, the soft music from the little speaker on the shelf… nothing. She had cried in that relentless, inconsolable way that made everyone in the room feel helpless.

Sofia took her.

And she stopped.

Not gradually. Not after a few minutes of adjusting. She simply stopped. Immediately. Like a switch. Her whole body went slack in Sofia's arms, her small fists uncurling, her head turning into Sofia's neck.

The room was quiet.

The nanny looked at me.

I kept my face still.

"She likes you," I said.

"Babies are funny," Sofia said softly. She was not looking at me. She was looking at the baby with an expression she was trying to keep neutral and not quite managing. Something underneath the neutrality that was too specific, too quiet, too much like the way I had watched new mothers look at their children in the market.

Not like a stranger holding someone else's child.

Like someone trying very hard not to look like a mother.

"What's her name?" Sofia asked.

"We haven't decided yet."

She nodded slowly. Her thumb moved in a small circle on the baby's back. 

"She's perfect," she said.

I watched her hands.

A wolf's nose doesn't lie and mine was telling me something I wasn't ready to say out loud yet. Underneath Sofia's perfume and the baby's powder there was something else... a thread, faint but there, the kind of biological trace that exists between a mother and her newborn in the early weeks. The bond scent. The one that doesn't fully wash off no matter how carefully you try.

My wolf had gone completely still.

Not the stillness of calm.

The stillness of certainty.

"I should get going," Sofia said finally, passing the baby back to me. "Early morning tomorrow."

"Of course."

She hugged me at the door. Long and warm, the same as the café. I hugged her back.

"I'm glad you're home," I said against her shoulder.

"Me too," she said. "I missed you."

I closed the door behind her.

I stood in the hallway with the baby against my chest and I thought about the way Sofia had walked in that evening and gone straight for the child before she had even taken her coat off. The way Tristain had looked at her across that café like they had an agreement that predated my knowledge of it. The way this baby supposedly found at a border gate, supposedly abandoned had gone silent in Sofia's arms like she had finally found the one place in the world she recognized.

The baby made a small sound and turned her face into my neck.

I pressed my lips to her head.

"I love you," I whispered.

And that was the problem.

I already did.

****

Upstairs I heard Tristain's phone ring. I heard him answer it. I heard him walk to the far end of the corridor before he started speaking, his voice dropping low enough that the words dissolved into the walls.

He had never done that before.

Not once in five years of marriage.

I stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened to the silence where his words should have been.

And I thought about the text message I had received the night before, from the number I didn't recognize.

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

Tristain had known Sofia was coming before I did.