Forsaken Luna

CHAPTER FIVE: Five Years

"Mama, watch!"

I looked up from the bakery register just in time to see my daughter, five years old, all elbows and stubbornness, dark hair flying loose from its braid, take a running leap off the bottom step of the fire escape and land in a crouch so perfectly balanced that Nora, sweeping flour off the counter behind me, actually dropped her broom.

"Hazel Calloway," I called, half a laugh and half a genuine warning, "what did I say about jumping off things taller than you?"

"I am taller than it now!" Hazel bounced upright, grinning a gap toothed grin, utterly unbothered. "See, Aunt Nora? Perfect landing. Didn't even wobble."

"You never wobble." Nora retrieved her broom, shaking her head with the particular fondness she reserved only for Hazel. "It's honestly a little unnerving, kid."

It was more than unnerving. It was the thing I lay awake thinking about some nights, in the two bedroom apartment we'd finally moved into eighteen months ago, once the bakery's little side business, sourdough starters and canned preserves I sold at the Saturday market, my grandmother's old recipes finally worth something, had brought in enough that I didn't need to count every single dollar anymore.

Hazel didn't wobble. Hazel didn't get hurt falling from heights that would've broken a human child's arm. Hazel's night vision was, by her kindergarten teacher's slightly alarmed account, "unusually excellent," and she ran faster than every single other child at the Millhaven Elementary field day, fast enough that one of the other mothers had asked me, only half joking, whether Hazel was secretly nine instead of five.

She hadn't shifted. Not yet. But five years of watching her, of memorizing the particular growl that colored her laugh sometimes when she was really excited, of catching her golden eye shine in the dark hallway at three in the morning when she thought I was asleep, five years had taught me that it wasn't a matter of if. It was a matter of when, and whether I'd be ready when it happened, three hundred miles from anyone who could teach either of us what to do about it.

"Order up," Nora called, sliding a paper bag across the counter to a waiting customer, and I shook myself back into the moment, back into the warm, flour scented, ordinary safety of a Tuesday afternoon that felt, as most of my Tuesday afternoons did now, genuinely, hard won good.

I had built this. Me. Alone, mostly, Nora would object to the word alone, and she wasn't wrong to, she'd been more family to me and Hazel in five years than anyone in Ironwood had managed in nineteen, but I had built it. The apartment. The little business. The school enrollment. The pediatrician who never once asked why Hazel's bloodwork ran a little strange. The entire small, sturdy, unremarkable life that no one back home had ever thought I was capable of.

I had stopped, somewhere in the last five years, being the invisible omega girl who got rejected in front of a hundred people and walked out with her chin up because it was the only thing she had left to hold onto.

I had become someone else. Someone I liked, actually, most days. Someone who didn't flinch anymore when she thought about that Moon Ceremony, who could say the words he rejected me in her own head without her whole chest caving in.

Some nights, folding laundry or closing out the register, I would catch myself almost grateful for it, for the rejection, for the running, because it had handed me a version of my life I never would have chosen but had somehow grown to need. I did not miss Ironwood. I did not miss the whispers or the low ranking or the feeling of being tolerated instead of wanted. I had built something smaller and plainer and entirely, completely mine, and most days that felt like more than enough.

"Mama, can we get ice cream after close?" Hazel had abandoned the fire escape and climbed up onto the stool behind the register, swinging her legs, chin propped on her hands, watching me with those storm grey eyes that I still, five years later, sometimes caught myself staring into a half second too long.

"If you finish your reading log tonight, yes."

"Deal." She stuck out her small hand to shake on it, an old habit we'd built together, and I shook it solemnly, and for one whole, ordinary, golden moment, everything in my life felt exactly as sturdy and safe as I had spent five years working to make it.

That was the exact moment the bell over the bakery door rang.

I didn't look up right away, customers came and went all day, that's what the bell was for, but Hazel did, because Hazel noticed everything, and I watched her small face go very still, very focused, the way it did whenever something caught her wolf senses before her human mind had caught up.

"Mama," she said slowly, quietly, in a voice I'd never heard her use before. "That man smells like home."

Ice went straight down my spine.

I looked up.

And standing in the doorway of Whitfield's Bakery, framed by the afternoon light, five years older, five years harder, storm grey eyes locked on mine with an expression I had never once let myself imagine seeing on his face, not anger, not coldness, but something that looked, impossibly, like a man who had just found the one thing he'd spent five years searching for and couldn't quite believe it was real, Was Ronan Vale.