Chapter Twenty-Three: Ethan Calls

               Sophie Steele

"Mummy!"

The voice came through before I'd even gotten the phone fully to my ear, loud enough that I had to adjust my grip, loud enough that I felt the sound land somewhere warm in my chest before I'd processed a single word.

"Hi, baby." I stepped further into the garden, away from the villa's windows, away from anything that needed my attention for the next few minutes. "Are you being good for Miriam?"

"I'm always good," Ethan said, with the complete confidence of someone who had never once considered an alternative possibility. "When are you coming home?"

"Soon," I told him. "I have a few more things to finish here."

"What things?"

"Grown-up things."

"That's not an answer," he said, which was true, and also exactly the kind of thing he'd started saying lately, picked up from somewhere, deployed with devastating accuracy.

I laughed. "You're right. It's not."

"Did you eat your vegetables?" he asked, switching topics with the speed only a six-year-old could manage.

"I did, actually."

"What kind?"

"Does it matter?"

"Miriam says it matters which kind. She says broccoli doesn't count if you only eat one piece and call it done."

"Miriam is very wise."

"She is," Ethan agreed solemnly. Then, after a pause that felt like he was building toward something important: "Mummy. Does the house have a pool?"

I stopped walking and looked across the garden, the manicured hedges, the stone paths, the fountain near the far wall that had been running quietly since before I was born.

"There's a fountain," I said carefully.

"Is it a pool fountain or a decoration fountain?"

"Decoration, I think."

"That's disappointing," Ethan said, with the gravity of someone delivering difficult news. "If it had a pool I think I should come and see it….for research."

"Research."

"Yes. To check if it's a good pool."

"I'll keep that in mind," I told him, smiling so widely it actually hurt slightly, an unfamiliar muscle working after days of careful neutrality.

"Okay." A pause, and then, quieter, in the voice he used when he was working up to something that mattered more than pools. "I miss you, Mummy."

My throat did something complicated. "I miss you too, my love. So much."

"Rowan's nice," Ethan offered, like a consolation prize. "He fixed my cart wheel. And he's very big, so the monsters definitely won't come."

"That's good," I managed.

"When you come back," Ethan said, "can we get pasta? The good kind, with the cheese on top."

"Of course we can."

"Okay. I'm going to go now, Miriam says it's bath time and I don't want to but I'm going to anyway because I'm very mature."

"You are very mature," I agreed.

"Bye, Mummy. I love you to the moon and the other moon too, the one we can't see."

"I love you to both moons," I said, and my voice cracked slightly on the last word, and I didn't try to hide it because he'd already hung up, and the garden was quiet again, and I was standing there holding a phone against my chest with my eyes stinging in a way that had nothing to do with grief this time.

I stayed like that for a moment. Just breathing, letting the warmth of it settle into the places that had been cold since I arrived.

The garden around me was beautiful in the indifferent way everything on this estate was beautiful, hedges trimmed with absurd precision, the fountain murmuring its quiet noise, the afternoon light doing something gold and soft across the lawn. I sat down on the low stone bench near the rose beds and let myself just exist for a minute, phone in my lap, the conversation still glowing somewhere behind my ribs.

I heard footsteps on the gravel path behind me. Slow. Then they stopped.

I didn't turn immediately. I knew the weight of those footsteps now, the particular rhythm of them, the way they paused rather than retreated when they realised I wasn't alone with my thoughts.

"You can come in," I said, without turning around.

A beat. Then the footsteps resumed, slower now, and Dominic came to stand near the bench, not sitting, just present, the way he always seemed to manage presence without performance.

"I didn't mean to interrupt," he said.

"You didn't." I looked up at him. "He was telling me about a pool that doesn't exist."

Something flickered across Dominic's face. Not quite a smile, but close enough that I could feel its shape.

He sat down. Not close, but not far either, the kind of distance that felt deliberate without being calculated.

For a while neither of us said anything. The fountain kept its quiet noise. Somewhere beyond the hedges a bird started up, stopped, started again.

It was, I realized, the first time since I'd arrived that the silence between us hadn't felt like something either of us needed to fill or escape.

"Does he know?" Dominic said finally. Quiet and careful. "About what we are to each other."

I shook my head. "He's six."

"Right." Dominic nodded slowly, looking out at the hedge line. "Okay."

A pause stretched between us, long enough that I thought the conversation might end there, settling back into the comfortable quiet we'd just found.

Then: "What did you tell him about his father?"

I looked at the hedges. The light was doing something particular to them now, gold catching on the leaves, the whole garden glowing faintly at the edges the way things did right before evening properly arrived.

"I told him his father didn't know about him," I said.

The silence that followed was different from the one before. Heavier. I felt Dominic go still beside me, the kind of stillness that wasn't about control anymore, just about absorbing something.

"That was generous," he said eventually. His voice had dropped, gone rougher at the edges.

"It was true," I replied.

I hadn't said it to be kind to him. I'd said it because it was the simplest version of the truth that a six-year-old could hold without it becoming a weight he had to carry. Ethan didn't need to know about phone calls overheard through doorways, about uncles and pressure campaigns and seven years of silence built on a misunderstanding neither of us had chosen. He just needed to know his father hadn't known. That his father wasn't a person who'd looked at the idea of him and walked away.

Because that part, at least, was true. And it mattered. It mattered more than almost anything else in this entire mess.

Dominic was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again his voice was different, lower, something underneath it that I recognized from the corridor at midnight, from the bathroom, from every moment since I'd arrived when the careful Alpha exterior had slipped just slightly.

"Thank you," he said. "For that... For not letting him grow up thinking he was..." He stopped and started again. "For not letting him carry it."

"He's six," I said again, softer this time. "He doesn't need to carry anything yet. That's the whole point of being six."

Dominic looked at me the way he had in the bathroom before everything had gone sideways, the way that made my wolf go quiet and warm at the same time, an entirely different reaction from the alertness it had carried since I arrived.

"He sounds happy," Dominic said. "On the phone…He sounded happy."

"He is happy," I told him. "Whatever else is true about all of this, Ethan has had a happy life. I made sure of that."

"I believe you," Dominic said, and something in the way he said it, plain and immediate, no hesitation, made my chest tighten in a way I wasn't prepared for.

The garden settled around us. The light kept shifting gold to amber. For a few minutes, sitting there with him, with Ethan's voice still warm in my memory, with the fountain murmuring its endless quiet noise, I let myself feel something I hadn't let myself feel in this house in seven years.

Something that felt, almost, like peace.

Then my phone buzzed in my lap.

I looked down. Lena's name on the screen, a message arriving in three short bursts, one after another, the kind of urgency that didn't wait for a reply.

“Sophie. The car watching Ethan's building.”

“We have the registration.”

“It belongs to your mother.”