Chapter 173 Our Growth
ADRIANA
The sisters did not exaggerate when they spoke about tiredness I would feel. Thankfully, it was incapacitating, but a gentle depletion that required me to sleep more and move more slowly.
Elijah was extremely attentive in a not hovering way. He gave me space but he was consistently present and making sure that things were handled before I had to think about them.
His mother helped with the children without being asked.
Hazel managed three things that required managing without telling me about them until they were managed.
On the third day I felt like myself again. More than like myself, which I was still adjusting to. The training had continued even through the recovery and the stability it was building had become something I could feel as a part of my ordinary experience rather than only as a contrast to the instability that had preceded it.
Yara was fully present. We were talking again the way we had always talked, though it was now deeper compared to before the twins were born.
I went to the nursery and picked up both boys.
One under each arm, I stood there with my sons against my chest and felt the power running its steady current through me and felt it recognize them the way it had always recognized them. The deepest possible activation of the maternal instinct that had been causing all the difficulty and I held it. Completely. Without effort.
Liam grabbed my hair.
Elijah Junior made the sound he made when he was about to complain about something.
I felt the full weight of what we had survived to get here and let myself have the feeling of it rather than moving through it quickly toward the next thing.
Elijah appeared in the doorway. He looked at the three of us and his expression did something I couldn't explain. But it was clear he was capturing the moment.
“I wanted to show you something,” I said.
“I can see,” he said, though neither of us moved.
The bustle of the morning went on around us, the pack moving through its ordinary day, the season having shifted enough that the light through the nursery window.
“The vow renewal,” I said eventually.
“Yes,” he said.
“Soon.”
“Whenever you’re ready.”
I looked at him over the heads of our sons and felt the particular love that has been tested and held and come out the other side of the testing still intact, never unchanged, intact in the ways that matter. Stronger in the places where it had been stressed, the way bone heals stronger at a fracture.
“I’m ready,” I said.
He smiled.
Leo was somewhere in the building doing something that would probably require explanation later. Hazel was already on her second crisis of the day and managing it without informing me, which was her gift.
I held my sons and stood in the nursery with my husband and felt the quiet that comes not from the knowledge that you are equal to whatever arrives. That you have been tested and you have held. That the people beside you have held with you and will hold again.
It was enough.
No, it was everything.
I would not have traded a single difficult thing that had brought me here.
The beach was quiet at this hour.
The children were home with Elijah’s mother, who had settled into the packhouse after several years of being away from it. She was grateful, it showed in her actions that she understood she was given something she had not earned, but she intended to honor it accordingly.
She was good with the boys, patient and warm. It surprised Elijah sometimes, catching him off guard when he rounded a corner and found her reading to Leo or watching the twins with an expression of uncomplicated love that he had spent years not believing she was capable of.
He was still working on forgiveness. He suspected he would be working on it for some time. But it was happening, which was more than he had thought possible on the day she arrived at the gate.
Tonight was theirs. Just Adriana and him, the way it had been in the beginning before everything that had come after the beginning.
He had brought her here without telling her what he had planned, which was becoming something of a pattern between them that she accepted with the resigned amusement of a woman who had learned that certain surprises from this particular man were reliably worth the suspense.
He had set things up earlier in the day while she was occupied with a pack matter, and now they stood on the sand with the ocean moving quietly in front of them and the table he had arranged set behind them with candles that the evening wind was working to extinguish and repeatedly failing.
He reached into his pocket and produced two necklaces. Simple, unelaborate, each one carrying the other’s initials alongside a small symbol that meant something private between them.
“I want to renew our vows to you,” he said.
He had not rehearsed this, which was intentional. Rehearsed words had always felt dishonest to him, like wearing something that belonged to someone else.
“You are the best thing that has ever entered my life. I cannot balance that ledger and I’ve stopped trying. What I can do is spend the rest of whatever time we get making sure you know it.”
Adriana looked at him and tears moved down her face.
They spoke about it long ago, when the twins were babies, but never got round to doing it. He thought it would be the perfect time.
She took her own necklace from his hand and put it around his neck first, which he had not expected, and then she held out hers for him to clasp.
“You found me on the worst night of my life,” she said. “And you kept finding me, every time. That is what I want to do for you for the rest of ours. Keep finding you.” She smiled through the tears. “Even when you’re infuriating.” He chuckled as she added, “especially then.”
He kissed her.
They renewed their vows there on the sand with no witnesses but the ocean and the evening, and then they sat down to the dinner he had arranged and talked for hours about everything and nothing.
Afterward they sat on the sand and looked at the stars.
“I hope it stays like this,” Elijah said. Not a request exactly. More an acknowledgment of how much he wanted to protect this specific configuration of life.
“It will,” Adriana said. “We’ll make sure it does.”