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I considered that. Caspe was right. He hadn’t given up everything, had he?
But then, I hadn’t either. I wasn’t willing to give up the resistance. I’d made compromises, but I couldn’t let it all go.
“You don’t have to be in a relationship with this guy for him to be a father to his child, you know that, right?”
I glared at Caspe. “Obviously, I know that.”
But maybe I’d been thinking about all of it too narrowly. Holston had left. It was best for both of us. But I did need to think about what was best for our baby. And maybe Holston did need to know.
TWENTY
holston
I was hungover when I got the query on my bracelet from her.
Six gemoons had passed, and you would have thought I would have been over it by now. I should have been over it.
I just…
Everything suddenly seemed meaningless. I tried to get back into the things that I had done before, but they didn’t feel the same. I would go out into the woods, and I would hunt or make shelter or build a fire, and I was good at all those things, but they wereemptynow, in some way they’d never been before.
So, it had become something I only did enough to make enough income to pay my bills. I did the bare minimum. It was a job, not a lifestyle anymore.
The shittiest thing about it was how much I missed it.
But when I tried to do it, it just… it wasn’t enough anymore, somehow.
I knew I also missed her.
I also knew, deep down, that I couldn’t have stayed there with her, that I wanted her, but that she wouldn’t be enough either. I wished I could somehow have both. I thought if she was here, if I was coming home from a hunt to knowing that she was in this huge house, waiting for me, that it would make all the difference.
But what would she do here?
She couldn’t just sit around in my house waiting for me all the time. That was no kind of life for her.
So.
It was what it was.
I kept telling myself it would pass, that eventually, I would feel better again, and I waited and waited, and…
I drank alot.
So, there she was, a holographic image of her head and shoulders coming up out of my bracelet, and I was rubbing my face, wondering if my hair was sticking up on one side, staring at her bleary-eyed.
“Cypra,” I said.
“I just have a question for you,” she said.
I blinked at her. “It’s been a really long time.” She looked good. Her face seemed fuller, her cheeks a little rounder, and it made her seem pretty and luminous, and I remembered the way she smelled and the way she felt in my arms, and that feeling burrowed into my chest and bloomed in a bright ache.
“You’re happier now, right?”
“Uh…” I ran my fingers over my hair, trying to tell whether or not it looked positively horrible. “This is the reason you contacted me?”
“I’m pregnant.”
I felt as if the entire room squeezed in on me, the walls closing in, the ceiling falling on my head. I couldn’t breathe.
