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The very first entry of her search results told her all that she needed. Jackson Edmund Hemming the eighth, lifelong resident of Cambric Creek, grandson of the now deceased previous mayor, and current mayoral candidate. The first photograph of the man made her whimper. He had Lowell's sharp jaw and dark eyes, clearly a relation. Another link clicked showed her information about his family, his wife and young son, volunteer work in the community, and large family here in Cambric Creek.
The next link she clicked brought up an article about the man from the coffee shop, Grayson Henry Hemming the fifth, the important litigation being undertaken in the nation's capital pertaining to multi-species healthcare and the violation of fundamental medical rights, propagated by the Food and Drug Administration, according to the current allegations being made by the Werewolf Defense League. This was the brother he lived with, she realized. Imperious and haughty and expensive looking, the exact sort of person whose home would resemble a luxury hotel and who bought expensive Christmas presents for his family.
Lowell had told her that he had a large family, but he'd never mentioned he was a member of thefirstfamily. The middle child, a fact over which she had laughed at the time, his mother a werewolf from a pack outside their community, and his father . . .
Moriah whimpered.His father. She was uncertain of her place in the community, didn't know if she truly belonged and if she ought to stay. She felt removed from community events, out of sync with her neighbors, and too many years of nonparticipation with Sorben had left her feeling disconnected from the goings-on of Cambric Creek . . . But one would've needed to live under an extremely remote rock at the bottom of a particularly deep cave in the middle of the Black Hills, surrounded by nothingness for miles to have not known who Jack Hemming was. Moriah felt disconnected, but she still paid attention to gossip, and there was no one else her neighbors loved to gossip about more than Jack Hemming, his ambitions, and his sons.
He did not hold office, but everyone knew who truly ran the town. He was the most influential werewolf in the area, possibly in the entire region. His word was law, and if the powers that be did something he did not like, he simply circumvented them. Moriah remembered, shortly after she and Sorben had purchased their house, the letter that every household in Cambric Creek received from the man himself, voicing his displeasure with the current administration's refusal to grant new businesses the opportunity to expand their downtown area, forcing residents to Bridgeton and Starling Heights and beyond, forcingpatronage of human-run industry. The line had stood out to her. As a human in the community, she hadn’t known how she was meant to feel.
Included with the form letter was an application to apply for the newly-created Founder's Fund, a grant program being started by him and several members of the Slade and Applethorpe families, encouraging businesses to stay in Cambric Creek, to open doors within the community. Moriah reflected that he had gotten his wish. A decade later, the downtown area was flourishing. There were no shortages of shops and restaurants and pubs, all owned and operated by trolls and goblins, orcs and satyrs, harpys and shifters. There was very little need to go to Bridgeton at all, a prophetic blessing once the virus began ripping its way through the human community.
She felt dizzy. She felt sick. She remembered telling Lowell that he was a bit of a brat that very first afternoon they had met at the little café, and she began to laugh, and laugh, and laugh.A brat indeed.
The rest of the week passed in a blur, for she was busy with work, and didn't have time to dwell on the pains she had taken to keep him from meeting her in Cambric Creek, a comedy of errors if there ever was one. The full moon was approaching, and she had begun to feel the familiar prickle beneath her skin, her full moon estrus cycle beginning to warm and bubble at her core. She hadn't decided what she wanted to do. She didn't know how to tell him that she had changed her mind, and didn't want to risk not seeing him again. She could not,wouldnot have a baby with the son of a prominent werewolf family and not actuallyhavea werewolf.
Besides, she told herself. She had gotten used to the tail wags.
Her therapist was right — she needed to decide her priorities and the direction she wanted her future to take.
* * *
“DO YOU STILL WANT TOhave a baby right now?”
The question seemed to hang in the air. Moriah felt as if she were standing at a great precipice, with the weight of her own expectations and guilt at her back, but when she gazed down into the abyss, it was only a shallow puddle. Her reflection stared back. Her younger self, a young woman who loved color and texture and laughter, who wanted to see the world and create, who had traded all of her own ambitions for a bad marriage and a small town with interesting people that she didn’t feel any connection with. She could step into the puddle with ease, she realized, without falling, changing the fate of the young woman trapped within.
“There’s something I want you to consider, Moriah. I don’t want you to answer right now. I just want you to think about it. We’ve talked a lot about transference and displacement, and I know those are big concepts. They can be scary to confront. So I just want you to think about this, and we’ll talk about it when you’re ready. Did you want to have a baby so desperately with your ex-husband because you wanted to create something out of your love together? Or did you want to have a baby so you wouldn’t be so lonely with him?”
It had been two weeks since Despina, the sphinx, posed the question to her. Two weeks of chewing it, of folding it up like a blanket and locking it into the closet of her mind with the other things she didn’t want to contemplate. Two weeks of pulling it out and wrapping it around her, feeling intense grief with its weight, not sure what she was grieving in the first place.
“I don’t think I do,” she murmured quietly.
Across the coffee table, Despina nodded, smiling encouragingly, and Moriah straightened in her chair, steeling her nerves.
“I don’t want to have a baby right now,” she said more forcefully, her conviction firmly in place. “That-that doesn’t mean not ever, because I do. And I want to have one within the next three or four years. But I don’t want to have one right now. I don’t want to do this alone.”
The sphinx’s huge smile made her dark eyes narrow to obsidian slits.
“I’m very proud of you. You’ve worked so hard to be able to say those words.”
Moriah let out the breath she had been holding, deflating like a balloon and sinking against the back of her seat. She had told her therapist that she had been taking birth control for the past several months, a little white pill at the back of her tongue every morning, and so far, they had worked.
She saw Lowell weekly now, talked to him constantly, and she knew she needed to tell him the truth. She’d been terrified when she got sick, thinking she would never leave her house again until this virus was no longer a threat, and when she’d tested negative, seeing him had been the only thing on her mind. She wouldn’t be going back to the clinic. She was due for her blood work anyway, and they would undoubtedly be able to tell that she had been actively sabotaging the results. Wasting money on a dream she wasn’t sure she wanted anymore seemed a fantastically foolish thing, and she was done pretending. She was done with this charade, done wasting money, done lying to herself. But she did not want to be done with him.
He had appeared on her doorstep after she confronted him about his family.
“You don’t understand. You don’t understand what it’s like. Everywhere I go, people already know me. But they don’t knowme,” he emphasized, frustration ringing in his voice. “They don’t know me. They know Trapp. Or they went to school with Jackson. Or they’ve been to one of Grayson’s parties. They think they know me because they know my father, buteveryoneknows my father. They don’t know me, but they think they know everything about me. They use my name without introducing themselves, or they ask me questions about my mom, and I’ve never fucking seen these people before! I don’t know how to make friends here or meet people because they already have a preformed opinion of my family, and I can’t stand it.”
She had pulled him inside. Made him dinner. Watched breathlessly as he prowled around her entire house, examining everything with a huge smile. He asked a million questions and never stopped talking, his various trains of thought intersecting and passing each other at lightning speed, tapping his fingers on the table, jiggling his toe against the chair, unable to be quiet or hold still. Her house would never be silent again, she realized. Not as long as he was in it. Pushing him down into her French café breakfast nook felt like something out of a dream, for as many times as she had fantasized about it by then.
He pulled her outside into her backyard, and they lay in the middle of the grass, head to head, staring up at the stars. She kissed the tip of his nose, and her eyes flooded with tears.It’s just the shots. It’s the shots doing this, doing all of it.
“Tell me this isn’t just because of the shots they’re giving me, the way I feel. Tell me this isn’t some artificial hormone, that once I stopped taking them, I’m going to be horrified with all of this.”
Lowell only smiled softly, bumping his forehead with hers before turning his head to look up at the sky again.
“The sky always looks the same, you know. You asked me once before about my favorite place I’ve been, but I don’t think I can answer that. It’s never about the place. I’ve slept on the ground in a hundred different countries, and the sky always looks the same, no matter where you are. The sunset is always a sunset. That’s why I hate taking shots of landscapes and geographical things. Volcanoes in the northern seas don’t look any different than volcanoes in the tropics. Mountaintops are mountaintops. If there wasn’t a caption on the photo, you would have no idea where it was taken. It’s people who make the difference. The mountains in one country will look exactly the same as the one in the next, but the old woman selling her hand-woven rugs at the base of it will be different. She’ll have a different smile and a different story to tell. The only thing that’s ever the same is they all want to bring me home and cook for me,” he laughed. “And they’re always excellent cooks.”
“You go with them?” She asked, her question and her tears momentarily forgotten.
