name, but Darcy pretended not to hear. She’d half-expected him to follow her…but he didn’t.
Good, she told herself. That’s good.
With Candice, Edith, and Seren all pregnant, there had inevitably been a lot of baby talk at mealtimes over the past few days. Fenrir—still in his wolf form at that point—hadn’t been present, of course, but his friends had dropped a lot of oh-so-casual hints about how much he was looking forward to the new arrivals. They’d probably thought that they’d been helping his case, extolling his virtues by talking about how good he was with kids.
She’d seen Fenrir with little Beth, the last time that he’d been human. How he’d held her; how he’d gazed at her with soft adoration.
He was a hellhound. He couldn’t help being pack-oriented, obsessed with family, kids, babies. She’d known that.
She hadn’t thought it mattered.
But now…
Now, maybe it did.
Chapter 25
Fenrir found her in the cafe next to the store, perched on a high stool at a small table. An untouched latte sat in front of her, cooling.
“Oh, hey.” Darcy smiled at him, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “That was fast. You didn’t need to rush, you know.”
“Yes. Did.” He put his shopping bags under the table, taking the seat opposite her. “Darcy. What is wrong?”
She stared down into her coffee. “You haven’t asked why I’m so short.”
This made such little sense, he thought he must have misunderstood. He spent a moment turning the words around in his head, trying to work out what he’d missed.
“Why would I?” he said. “Is how you are.”
“Yeah, but there’s a reason for it.” She fidgeted with her cup, still not looking at him. “Do you know what a chromosome is?”
He dropped his gaze, ashamed of his own ignorance. “No.”
“It’s a thing in your body that contains your DNA. The instructions that determine how you grow, what you look like, how your body and brain work. One of the things that they determine is your biological sex. Sex chromosomes come in two kinds: X and Y. If you have two X chromosomes, your body is female, and if you have an X and a Y chromosome, your body is male.” Darcy made a face, wrinkling her nose. “That’s actually a vast oversimplification, but we don’t need to get into all the variants and possibilities now. You with me so far?”
“Think so. But I don’t understand why you are telling me this.”
“Because sometimes things go wrong. You can get mutations, damage on a chromosome. Sometimes that means the baby can’t be born at all. Sometimes it causes health issues, or just changes the way someone develops, so they’re different from most other people.”
Darcy took a deep breath. She looked up, meeting his eyes at last.
“Sometimes,” she said, “you can be born missing a chromosome entirely. Like me.”
He wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to do. She clearly expected him to do something.
“Already knew you were special,” he said. “Didn’t know you were literally one in a million, though.”
From the way her face broke into a surprised smile, he’d got it wrong, but also somehow right.
“Well, about one in three thousand or so,” she said. Her shoulders relaxed a little, but her hands were still clenched around her cup. “It’s called Turner syndrome. I only have one X chromosome. You could say I’m half a woman.”
She said the words lightly, as though they were a joke, but he heard the pain under the glibness. Someone had said that to her, more than once. And it had hurt.
“No,” he growled. “Never. You are all woman. Whole. Not missing anything.”
The tightness around her eyes softened. “Thanks. But biologically speaking, there are a few things my body can’t do. Like make enough growth hormones, for instance. That’s why I’m so short. If doctors spot it early, they can give you shots to help you grow. But I was diagnosed too late for that. In a way, I got lucky. Turner syndrome can cause all kinds of issues, but I was pretty healthy as a kid. Just tiny. My parents are short too, so no one thought much of my lack of growth until I was fifteen.”
“What happened then?”
“It’s more like what failed to happen.” Darcy waved a hand at her own chest. “At that point, every other girl in my class was wearing bras and complaining about periods. And I still looked like a nine-year-old. Turner syndrome usually means you can’t make enough hormones to start puberty. Uh, that’s when your body starts