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Chapter 17: The Secrets We Keep

Kate's P.O.V.

I suspected that I was pregnant pretty early on. I had begun to notice subtle changes in my body and in my appetite that I had never experienced, and certain instincts that had no other explanation began to take hold of me.

At first I thought I was only imagining it- perhaps a pseudo-physical or psychosomatic response to our romp in the woods. After all, I was not in heat that evening in the woods, which is one of the reasons why I so eagerly jumped his bones, so by all accounts, pregnancy should not have even been a possibility. But, and you can choose to call it what you will, in spite of the doubts that lied beneath, I just had that feeling of life slowly beginning to blossom inside of me.

Such a feeling filled me with what I can only describe as an insurmountable level of joy, because, in my heart, I knew that Humphrey and I were about to embark on a wonderful new journey together and there was no one else I would have rather taken that journey with. However, there was a problem. We had flirted with the idea of pups before, but we both agreed that, given the violent, tumultuous state of the world, and his imminent departure to A-School, it would be best if we waited. I wondered what he would say if I told him that I was pregnant, if he would be happy, or if knowing would make him angry with me. And it wasn't exactly like I could keep any of this from him. One way or another he was bound to find out, so I knew that it would be best if I went ahead and told him myself, but I just didn't quite know how to. I had spent about a week trying to conjure up a plan and the courage to tell him, and I was finally ready, but as the old saying goes: "If you wanna hear the gods laugh, tell them your plans."

Humphrey's P.O.V.

When Winston finally lifted most of the pack's mandates, I was indescribably happy. The murders and the threats had stopped, omegas no longer needed escorts except in hours of darkness when it made the most sense to have one, and- though our relationship was still strained at the time, my friends and I made our amends to one another and were on the right path to how things used to be between us. My marriage to Kate was stronger than it had ever been, we made passionate love in our childhood hideaway, and life finally made sense to me again. I thought that everything had finally begun to turn around for everyone in the pack, but little did I know that trouble loomed on the horizon of the paradise in which I found myself.

Kate's P.O.V.

I never did tell Humphrey that I was pregnant. I had everything planned, and had rehearsed everything that I was going to say, but as a great poet once said: "The best laid plans o' mice and men go often astray," and before I could give him the news that he was going to be a dad, I suddenly discovered that I no longer had any news to give him. Somehow, some way, my pregnancy was no longer viable, and the family that I was so excited to start with him was dead. I remember the day I discovered such a tragic truth so vividly. The day was clear and mild. The air breathed sweet with the scent of flowers. Humphrey smiled at me in a fashion I'd never seen, and it was all shaping out to be an incredible day, but unfortunately that was not to be.

Much like that gut feeling I had to accompany the changes that I saw in myself and in my body, I could tell that something was wrong. I felt... different than I had in the days prior, almost like there was a looming sense of dread that hung over me no matter where I went. Nothing felt physically wrong, but in the fabrics of my very soul, I could feel that my dream had died. However, I was not willing to let it go, and for the first couple days, I lived in a perpetual state of denial. This was just a hiccup in my pregnancy and in a couple days everything would be fine, but as time wore on and my body began to revert back to its normal state, I could no longer deny the horrible reality from which I had run and I had to face it.

But how would I tell Humphrey? What would I even say to him? And should I even tell him at all? I know it sounds awful to keep such a terrible secret from him, but since I never told him that I was pregnant in the first place, he never knew. He never had anything to look forward to, or to fall in love with so much quicker and so much more deeply than he ever had before, and as such he never knew that he even had anything to lose. And he was happy not knowing. Who was I to lift that blissful veil from his eyes? Who was I to burden him with such pain?

So, ultimately I decided that the best course of action was to say nothing and carry that pain on my own; and gods was it hard. As I'm certain you can imagine, I was an emotional wreck, and I had no one to help me process my grief. In order to keep what had happened a secret from my husband, I had to once again do as my father had taught me so long ago. As a leader, I had to present an image of strength at all times. No matter what happened, no matter how I felt, I could never let anyone see me in any state of weakness. So while I was in the presence of my mate or others, I swallowed those feelings and buried them somewhere in my gut along with all of the other emotional traumas that I was not allowed to feel, and that I instead coped with by engaging in increasingly reckless behavior. I had been trapped in this vicious, toxic cycle for most of my life. It started in A-School when Flint killed himself, and with each new trauma, it got progressively worse until I had given up on life entirely. It was nearly the death of me, but I'm still here to tell you this story today, and now that I've gone and bored you with my personal brand of self pity, maybe I should actually get back to it...

Let's see... Ah yes.

The hardest part of it all was smiling and pretending that nothing was wrong as Humphrey and I sat across from one another in the evenings and had our dinner. I would sit there and listen to him talk, force myself to laugh at his corny jokes and try to contribute to the conversation the best that I could while I choked down so many meals that I had no appetite or desire to eat. The entire time I had to govern myself. I had to make sure that I never showed any indication that something was wrong, and I had to force myself to be present. It's difficult to describe. Physically, my body was there, but internally, my thoughts were shattered glass, scattered about in an endless sea of fog. I found that my mind would wander in these trying times, perhaps in an attempt to search for the parts of me that I had lost in my effort to spare my husband of the truth, or perhaps in some vain attempt to find meaning in Fate's cruel design. Whatever it was, my mental health was on a rapid decline, and I was the only one who knew.

I was angry at the world, but mostly, I was angry with myself. I knew that somehow the miscarriage was my fault. Perhaps I ate the wrong thing, or I didn't eat enough. Maybe I should have taken it easy at work instead of blindly rushing in to everything. Maybe if I had told Humphrey about them earlier, he and I could have consulted our pack doctor and learned exactly what we should do. Such thoughts and various "what ifs" would race on repeat through my mind as I lied down to sleep at night. The voices of guilt, self doubt and anger at myself all screamed at me in a vociferous accord and each seemed to shout even louder than the others over the chaos inside me in order to be heard.

So on many nights, sleep would elude me and I would simply lie awake until dawn and allow my head to subject me to the punishment that I felt I deserved. On other sleepless nights, I would sneak away from my den and simply walk the park. I never had any destination or goal in mind as I sauntered through the darkness. Honestly, all I really wanted was to be alone, and since I was privy to patrol schedules, I always knew exactly where I could go in order to avoid being spotted. Because if I was spotted, that would open the door for questions and conversation, and that was the last thing I wanted.

Of course, being out alone with nobody knowing where I was, was incredibly dangerous in spite of the recent break from the Artist's assault on our pack, but I didn't really care. I couldn't stay in that big, quiet den. The thought of little paws upon the rock floor beneath them, and the knowledge that such a sound would likely never bless my ears just made me too sad. I could have tried to talk to somebody, but I knew no one would understand, and I knew that once word got out to one, word would eventually get around to everyone and I didn't want it to become some big spectacle. I didn't want anyone's pity, and I certainly didn't want to be bombarded by the "love and support" that follows when such news is revealed. Sure, the pain of losing a child, even one you've never met, is indescribable, but I had carried the pain that far on my own and I was fine. So what was another 13 years, right?

Humphrey's P.O.V.

I can't recall exactly when I had started to suspect that she was no longer faithful to me, but about a week after Kate and I took that walk in the woods, she began to act quite strange. Suddenly she became very secretive, like there was something she wasn't telling me. I would fish for information, but she would simply dance around any questions I would ask her like the practiced politician that she was and would never give me a straight answer. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, she went cold. Maybe two weeks after our little romp, I noticed that she became very reserved and aloof. She did her best to present an air of normalcy, to act as though nothing had changed, but I guess I knew her a bit better than she thought I did, because in spite of her efforts, I could sense that inside she was battling something truly awful.

Of course, infidelity was not the first explanation to pop into my head. In fact, initially I just assumed that she had done what she always did, which was to experience something traumatic and then bury it somewhere inside of herself. What that traumatic something could have been, there was no telling. Part of the burial process was an outright refusal to talk about what had happened, and I learned early on to not try to pry or meddle in it.

I didn't agree with the way she handled trauma, and if I'm honest it worried me to no end because I could see yet another small piece of her die with each trauma to which she'd been subjected, but I had to let it be what it was. If I didn't, and I tried to help her, or suggest that she seek therapy, she would overcompensate for her emotional fragility with extreme outbursts of anger, and I had grown tired of the arguments. What she did made sense to her and I had to come to peace with it.

However, my scope of perception began to shift the night that I caught her sneaking out of the den. Ordinarily I am an incredibly heavy sleeper, but for whatever reason, that night I had grown rather restless. I would toss and turn then doze off for a few minutes and then I would wake up again only to repeat the cycle, and it was on one such occasion that I had slipped into the first stages of slumber that I suddenly felt Kate move. It was not uncommon for one of us to wake up in the middle of the night to relieve our bladders, or to accuse the other of snoring, but typically just enough care to be courteous to the other was taken in order to not wake them, but on that night, it was different.

I noticed that she moved with an extreme deliberation the likes of which I had never seen and it was clear to me that she didn't want me to know that she was leaving. I had no idea where she was going, why she was being so secretive and quiet, or if there was even anything worth looking into, but I knew that something wasn't right with her, and I was sick of being left in the dark. So I decided as I lied there and waited for her to leave that I would follow her and find out. I knew that tailing her would shake out to be quite the daunting task. After all, as an alpha, she was highly trained in situational awareness, and if she was trying to move about undetected as I suspected she was, her scrupulous eyes would become nearly impossible to evade. However, I knew that I would never get answers out of her by conventional means, so I didn't really have any other choice. I lied in wait for about a minute after I heard her paw steps fade then I pushed myself to my paws and began to follow.

As I stepped from the den into the cool embrace of the night, I took a moment to assay my surroundings, but I saw no trace of my mate. I cursed under my breath, because I had counted on being able to see her in order to keep tabs on her whereabouts. I didn't know the first thing about tracking, so finding her in the dark was going to be quite difficult, but thankfully her intoxicating scent had been logged in my memory since the day we first met. Thankfully, because of this, I was able to pick her olfactory nuances from the land around me and I began to follow them until up ahead in the distance, I saw her. And when I did, I realized that, sadly, my initial impressions of her were likely correct.

Contrary to how she moved when she left the den, she seemed to walk through the park with no purpose at all- no care for the nature of her footfalls, no objective, and no destination. She seemed so... lost. This both confused and intrigued me even more, because in all my life I had never seen her do anything without a decisive plan of action. Like a cold, calculating, machine, she was always on. She never lost her way, and she always traveled with the utmost certainty in her paw steps. Seeing her so unsure of herself, perhaps even seeing how she really was underneath everything was so... disenchanting.

Of course my feelings for her remained unchanged in this moment, but it was difficult to see her in such a light. To me, and to the rest of the pack, she was always a symbol of virtue and strength. Never faulting, never failing, an essence of beauty, grace and perfection. And the funny thing is, for the longest time I thought that I wanted to see who she really was underneath what her circumstances had created, for her to be more vulnerable around me, to show me the aura beneath the alpha, but when I finally saw it for the first time, it did not hit me in the way that I had always imagined. I guess in my head, in spite of my desires to see her be more vulnerable, to show me that she also knew the pains that an unforgiving world could bestow upon a wolf so we may better understand one another, I had always kinda hoped that that side of her did not exist. To know that she was just as beaten down as I, and that she had carried it with her silently all this time didn't grant me that idealistic connection over which I had previously fantasized. As I watched her be herself, I realized that my mate was merely a front for a tortured soul. And I felt empty.

I never did figure out why she suddenly changed. Once I understood all that she sacrificed in order to be what the rest of the pack needed her to be, I realized that sometimes, some things are better left alone. I could have told her what I saw. I could have asked her what was wrong, but ultimately what good would that have done for her? I know it sounds awful that I would allow her to continue to live in such a terrible state when I could have possibly done something about it, but she carried the pain of the world so others didn't have to, and if she was willing to do that for them, then who was I to be unwilling to do the same for her? I hated lying to my mate, but it was a small price to pay in order to protect her from the truth. She didn't know that I knew, and she was happy not knowing. Who was I to take that from her?