The garden holds the last of the sun—golden, thick, turning everything softer than it deserves. Ashton moves through his forms on the grass, bare feet pivoting with a precision that belongs to someone three times his age.
River lies on her stomach beside me, crayons scattered like evidence of a tiny, colorful crime scene. She's drawing with the focus of a surgeon, tongue poking between her teeth, silver-blonde hair pooling on the paper she's protecting with her whole body.
I lean against the stone bench and let myself breathe for the first time today. The word chemical still hums beneath my sternum and the warmth in my palms hasn't faded, but the evening air carries jasmine and the twins are whole and mine.
"Mama." River doesn't look up from her drawing, crayon moving in slow, deliberate circles. "Are you going to marry the Alpha?"
My spine straightens so fast I nearly crack a vertebra. Ashton's fist pauses mid-strike, then resumes—River keeps coloring, the question delivered with the casual devastation only a six-year-old can manage.
"No, baby." I keep my voice level through sheer maternal willpower. "He's married to Auntie Kailani, remember?"
"I know that." She rolls her eyes—an entire dissertation on adult stupidity contained in one rotation. "I mean later. After."
"After what, sweetheart?" I manage, though my hands have gone very still in my lap and my voice has climbed an octave.
"After they're not married anymore." She switches from blue to purple with the ease that doesn’t suite this conversation.
"Because he's sad, Mama. I can tell." She presses harder with the purple crayon, brow furrowed. "And you make people less sad."
The air leaves my lungs. I open my mouth, close it, open it again—a fish on a riverbank who somehow raised children capable of emotional precision strikes.
"River, that's not how—" I start, but the explanation dissolves before it forms. She's six—she sees a sad man and a mother who fixes things and the math is simple. The math used to be simple to me too, before love and logistics moved to different countries that refuse to share a border.
Ashton's foot connects with an invisible opponent's midsection. He doesn't break rhythm, doesn't turn around. "I like Dylan better."
The sentence drops into the garden like a stone into still water. River's crayon stops, and I stare at the back of my son's head—dark hair, stubborn posture, his father's build in miniature.
"Why?" The word comes out quieter than I planned, and my fingers curl into the fabric of my pants.
He shifts into the next form, hands resetting. "Because he shows up." A pivot, a strike. "Every day, same time."
Another pivot, another strike—the rhythm unbroken. "Doesn't forget. Doesn't make excuses."
He says it the way he says everything—factual, stripped of performance, delivered like a weather report. It isn't an accusation of Leon—Ashton doesn't deal in accusations. It's an observation about reliability, spoken by a boy who's been the man of his family since before he could tie his own shoes.
From that boy, showing up isn't a compliment. It's the entire vocabulary of trust compressed into two words, and something behind my ribs rearranges at the sound of it.
My throat works around something I can't swallow. He's six and his form is nearly perfect, and the part of me that wants to argue runs headfirst into the part that knows my son measures men by the only metric that's ever kept him safe.
"The Alpha is nice too," River protests, sitting up with the urgency of a defense attorney whose case just took a hit. "He reads to me sometimes. And he has the same eyes as Ashton."
"Having the same eyes doesn't mean anything." Ashton doesn't pause, doesn't inflect—just states it and moves into a side kick with the certainty he shouldn’t have after just a handful of training sessions.
River's mouth opens to argue, but nothing comes out. She looks at me for backup, and I have none, because my children are debating the two men in my life with the brutal clarity that adults spend years in therapy trying to recover.
The garden goes quiet except for Ashton's breath and River's crayon scratching paper as she returns to her drawing, the argument apparently settled through art.
I pull my knees to my chest. The thought I've been circling for weeks—the one I've been feeding excuses and counterarguments to keep at arm's length—walks through every defense I have and sits down.
If I had to choose a direction right now, I'd walk toward Dylan. Not because I love Leon less—not because what lives between us is smaller or quieter or easier to fold up.
Because choosing Dylan means choosing the thing I've never once chosen—myself. My safety. My children waking up every morning knowing exactly who will be at the door.
Leon is the pull in my blood, the ache behind my ribs. But Dylan is the man who shows up—and my son just told me, with the honesty of a boy who's had to be his own father, that showing up is everything.
Besides, he told me he loves me. Without agenda, without hidden motive, as if it’s as easy as breathing.
And I can’t tell I don’t love him back. That would be a lie, and I’ve never been much of a liar.
"Mama, look." River appears at my elbow, thrusting a piece of paper at me with both hands, her face incandescent with the pride of an artist unveiling her masterpiece.
Four figures stand in a garden: a woman with yellow hair, a tall man with dark hair and amber eyes, a boy, and a girl. Stars overhead, enormous. Green grass, a purple flower taller than the people.
River drew the family she imagines—me and Leon and the twins in a world where none of the complications exist, under stars, with a magic flower because she wanted one.
"That's us," River says, pressing a finger to each figure. "That's you, that's the Alpha, that's Ashton, that's me. And that's a magic flower because I wanted one." Just as I predicted.
"It's beautiful, baby." My voice holds, but barely—my fingers tighten on the paper until the edges crumple and I force myself to loosen my grip.
I look at the drawing and I look at my daughter's face—wide open, hoping, so certain that this version of the future is available if someone would just choose it—and I hold both truths inside my chest where they press against each other.
The direction I'd walk. The family she imagines. Neither cancels the other, and neither wins, and I'm sitting in a garden holding a drawing that breaks my heart with its hope.
Ashton finishes his final form and drops his hands. He walks to where we're sitting and looks at the drawing over my shoulder—his expression unchanged, but his hand finds my arm in a brief, firm grip that says everything his mouth won't.
River yawns, curling into my side, the drawing clutched against her chest. Ashton sits on my other side—not leaning, never leaning, but close enough that his shoulder presses mine.
Tomorrow is the pack gathering. Leon will stand on that platform and address his wolves, and I'll stand at the back holding my children's hands, and the distance between us will be exactly what it's always been.
I fold the drawing carefully and tuck it into my pocket, where it rests against my hip like a second heartbeat. Two futures in the same body, and I haven't figured out how to set either one down.