Chapter 10: Letters and Silences

Kaden wrote again in December. Not through the formal council channels this time — a plain envelope, her name in that familiar handwriting, routed through Silverbrook's general mail intake with no attempt to circumvent or to make the arrival feel significant. It arrived on a Tuesday between a supply order confirmation and a patrol scheduling memo, which Grace suspected was intentional.

The letter was brief. He was not asking for anything. He had been thinking about what she said — that the baby moved constantly and already had opinions — and he wanted her to know that he had spent the past month thinking about almost nothing else. He had been going through his father's things, he said, things he had boxed and avoided for years, and he had found photographs. His mother, pregnant. His father with his hand pressed to her stomach, looking at her with an expression Kaden said he had not previously understood.

He understood it now.

He was not asking to come back. He was not asking for anything. He just wanted her to know that something was changing in him, and that he thought she deserved to know it was happening even if it led nowhere.

Grace read it twice. Folded it. Put it with the others in the nightstand drawer that had become, without her planning it, a small archive of his attempts at honesty.

She did not reply immediately. She had learned, in the months since leaving Moonveil, the value of not reacting before she understood her own response. She let the letter sit for four days and checked in with herself periodically the way you check the temperature of something cooking — is this ready yet? Not yet. Not yet. Now.

On the fifth day she wrote back. Three sentences. The baby's due date was March fifteenth. She was healthy and strong and running out of room, according to Amara. Grace was naming her Lena.

She sealed the envelope before she could reconsider and gave it to Sera for the outgoing mail.

Sera received it with the professionalism of someone who had long since made peace with knowing things she did not comment on.

That evening, in the communal kitchen, Dara slid a bowl of soup across the table and said, without looking up from her own bowl: 'You named her.'

'Lena,' Grace said.

Dara was quiet for a moment. Then: 'It's perfect.'

Grace looked at the soup. 'It came to me at three in the morning. I was staring at the ceiling and I thought — Lena. And she kicked, immediately, like she'd been waiting for it.'

'Wolves know their names,' Dara said, with the certainty of someone raised in a pack where this was understood as simple fact.

Grace smiled. It happened more easily these days — smiling. She had noticed this without making a project of it, the way you notice that a bone that was broken has quietly finished healing.

Lena moved, a long rolling shift that pressed against Grace's ribs with cheerful disregard for her comfort.

'I know,' Grace said, pressing a hand to the spot. 'I know. Soup first.'

Dara laughed, and the kitchen was warm, and outside Silverbrook's winter pressed quiet and deep against the windows, and Grace ate her soup and felt the reliable, unspectacular goodness of a life that was working.

In Moonveil, Kaden received the reply three days later. He read it standing in the front hallway, still in his coat, having intercepted the mail before Marcus could sort it.

Lena.

He said it quietly to himself in the empty hallway. The word had weight and shape and a reality to it that hit him somewhere behind the sternum with more force than he had been prepared for.

His daughter had a name.

He stood in the hallway for a long time and let that be the only thing that was true, and when Marcus appeared from the direction of the kitchen with coffee and the expression of someone who understood everything and was going to say nothing, Kaden accepted the coffee and said simply: 'Her name is Lena.'

Marcus absorbed this. 'That's a good name,' he said.

'Yes,' Kaden said. 'It is.'

He went to his study. For the first time in months, he did not sit in the dark.