Chapter 307

Chapter 307
Caitlin's POV

I had been at the pack house for a week before I stopped waking up every morning surprised by where I was.

The first few days I would open my eyes and see the ceiling of the room they had given me and spend a full five seconds thinking I was somewhere else.

My flat my parents' house. Anywhere that was mine and familiar and made sense. Then the sounds of the house would reach me, the low voices downstairs, the dogs outside, the particular way the wind came through the gap at the top of the window, and I would remember.

This was my life now I was getting better at accepting that without it flattening me completely.

The house itself was not a bad place to be, which helped. It was large and warm and there was always food in the kitchen and nobody locked any doors.

I could walk outside whenever I wanted. I could sit in the garden or the library or the front room and nobody hovered over me or made me feel like a guest who had overstayed.

Luna made sure of that.

She had a way of making a space feel inhabited without filling it up. She would appear in whatever room I was sitting in, set down a cup of tea I hadn't asked for, say something brief and easy to respond to, and then leave again before I felt crowded.

She never pushed for conversation. She never asked questions that were too large. She just kept showing up, steady and warm, until I started looking forward to it.

Landon was quieter with me but no less kind. He had a habit of leaving things in my path without comment. A book on the hall table that turned out to be exactly the kind I liked.

A jacket on the hook by the back door on the first cold morning because he had noticed I always went out without one.

Small things deliberate things I was not going to pretend they didn't matter.

Maya kept her distance, which suited me fine. We passed each other in hallways and exchanged the minimum required acknowledgment and left it at that.

There was too much between us that hadn't been said yet to attempt anything more than that, and I was too tired to try.

James checked on me every morning. My strength was coming back steadily, he said. My senses were levelling out. My body was finishing what the turn had started and settling into its new version of normal.

He said it with the calm efficiency of someone reporting the weather and I found that easier to hear than sympathy would have been.

So I adjusted.

I walked the grounds in the mornings because the fresh air helped with the heightened senses more than staying inside did. I ate properly because James told me to and because it turned out that shifting burned through energy in a way that left me hungry at all hours.

I called my mother every two days and answered her questions and kept my voice normal and let her believe the lie I had built because there was nothing else I could do.

I was adjusting what I was not doing was thinking too hard about Alex.

He was everywhere without being in the way.

That was the thing about him that I couldn't get around. He didn't crowd me. He didn't follow me from room to room or show up uninvited or push me to talk. But he was always somewhere nearby, and I always knew exactly where.

The pull in my chest made sure of that.

I would be sitting in the library reading and I would know without looking up that he had just come in through the front door. I would be in the kitchen and feel him pass the doorway before I heard his footsteps.

It was a constant low awareness that I had stopped fighting because fighting it used energy I didn't have and it didn't work anyway he found small ways to be useful.

The second morning he appeared in the kitchen while I was attempting to figure out where everything was and silently opened the right cupboards in the right order without being asked.

When my hearing spiked badly during a loud afternoon when half the pack seemed to be in the garden at once, he appeared beside me with no explanation and led me through the quieter back hallway to the library without making it into anything.

When I couldn't sleep and ended up downstairs at two in the morning staring at the kitchen ceiling he made tea without asking if I wanted any and sat at the other end of the table and didn't try to fill the silence with words.

He was learning me quietly, carefully, without drawing attention to the fact that he was doing it.

I noticed. I didn't say so.

On the eighth day he knocked on the library door in the afternoon.

I was on the window seat with a book I had read four pages of in the last hour because my concentration kept slipping. I looked up.

He leaned against the doorframe with his hands in his pockets, which I had learned was his default posture when he was trying to look relaxed and was actually thinking carefully about something.

"How are you doing?" he asked.

"Fine," I said. Then, because it was true and he had earned honesty at minimum,

"Better than yesterday."

"James says your strength is almost back to full."

"It feels like it." I closed the book. "I went further on the walk this morning. No dizziness."

He nodded. He looked at me for a moment and then looked at the window and then back at me.

"I want to ask you something," he said.

I waited.

"Come out with me tomorrow not training, not anything to do with the pack or the shift or any of it. Just out." He paused.

"There's a town about forty minutes from here. Good food. Normal streets nothing that has anything to do with wolves or bonds or any of the things that have been sitting between us for the past week."

I looked at him.