Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 152

Chapter 152

Sve

Benji is finally asleep. It took forty minutes of walking, twenty minutes of feeding, and one complete circuit of every room in the east wing before he gave up and I’m exhausted. I put him down so carefully it felt like defusing a bomb. He didn’t wake up. Small mercies.

I’m sitting in the nursing chair in the dim nursery now, not moving, because moving feels dangerous, and once again, I find myself thinking about the bond.

Not because something triggered it. Just because it’s always there, underneath everything-the low hum I’ve been carrying for over three years. In the quiet of predawn, when everything else is still, I can feel it clearly.

The thread to Jaxon. Still there. And what unsettles me most, sitting here in the dark with my sleeping son, is that lately I’ve stopped being sure I know what it means.

It starts with small things I’ve been dismissing. The 2 AM kitchen moments. How natural it is-Jaxon making tea without asking, the particular ease of two people sitting with a baby between them and nothing to perform. I told myself that was just co-parenting comfort. Shared exhaustion. The specific warmth of someone who knows your child.

The way I handed Benji to him three days ago. Not a deliberate transfer-just a reflex, my hands going toward him in the moment before I’d consciously decided anything. And how right that felt, sharing that connection with him. How my body made the decision before my mind caught up.

Then there’s the look on his face when he watches me. I’ve been carefully avoiding examining that look for months. Registering it, filing it, and then telling myself I’m just observing his feelings without having any of my own in response. But lately I’ve started wondering if I was managing my own reaction as much as managing his.

I don’t love him the way I love Nicolai. I need to say that clearly, even here, even to myself in the predawn dark. What I have with Nicolai is chosen and real and whole in a way nothing with Jaxon ever was. That’s not in question.

But something else is there. Something that isn’t the bond’s echo-I know the bond’s echo, I’ve been feeling it for months, and this isn’t the same quality as that. This is something that lives underneath the bond. Something that would exist even if the bond weren’t there.

I’ve been explaining it as gratitude. Or co-parenting. Or leftover emotion from three years of a marriage, even a bad one. I’ve been explaining it as anything other than what it might actually be.

But right now, in the nursery quiet, I make myself look at it.

I think about who Jaxon is now. He showed up for Benji’s birth, tired and disheveled from the drive, and took my hand like it was second nature and talked me through contractions with a steadiness I didn’t know he had.

He learned Benji’s cries faster than I expected. Knows the difference between the hungry sound and the bored sound and the particular cry that means Benji has a philosophical objection to being put down. I always knew that he wanted, no needed, an heir. But I never dreamed the Jaxon I knew could be that engaged.

He makes tea and sits with me at 2 AM with no agenda attached. He moved into the west wing of another man’s estate and arranged his entire professional life around his son’s daily needs and has not once-not once-used that proximity as leverage for anything except fatherhood.

He has kept every promise he’s made since the divorce. Every single one.

I sit with that for a while, processing it in a way I haven’t let myself before now. This is the man Jaxon Vale has

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become in the time I’ve known him.

building a life with Nicolai-a real life, chosen, that makes complete sense. And simultaneously I’m watching Jaxon become someone I would have loved, specifically and easily, if he’d been this way three years ago.

Both of these things are true. I’ve been pretending only one of them is.

I love Nicolai. That’s not the question.

But I think about the bond I’ll eventually have with him-the chosen mate bond I know we’ll formalize at some point-and I think about what it will mean to have that intact alongside whatever this thing is that I haven’t named for Jaxon.

Can I have both? Should I? What does it mean that I even have to ask? I don’t have the answers.

I’m sitting in a nursery chair in the predawn dark and my son is sleeping and I don’t have answers and the thread to Jaxon hums faintly and I don’t know anymore what it’s telling me. This is new.

I’ve been certain for months. Certain about leaving. Certain about choosing Nicolai. Certain about the direction. Then this uncertainty arrived out of nowhere sometime in the last few weeks and I’ve been refusing to look at it directly.

I’m looking at it now. But it doesn’t clarify.

It just sits there, asking a question I don’t know how to answer yet.

Cara Anderson

Author

Thank you for reading!

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