She was the perfect daughter, perfect sister, and perfect packmate up until the venerable age of one-point-five. On her way back home from her first ever taste of painful independence, she met him. The love of her life. She didn't feel so alone anymore, and someone finally got her, and she was the center of his world, and it was perfect. They ran away together in a whirlwind affair, ignoring pleas from her family to stay close, to keep in touch.

They moved southwest and found the perfect little place to call home. A burrow big enough for two, and damp earth perfect for digging space for three, four, five... They were gonna make something of it. A pack, a family.

But cubs came, as they do. Two little girls. And things were perfect and easy except he was the one walking the borders while she was laid up with the kids, and it seemed like everyone who came was some damsel in distress. Just the luck of the draw, she guessed.

That summer, just a few weeks before she was due to give birth to their next litter, she found out one of those damsels was pregnant. One, and then two, and then she didn't care to know more than that. The pack was over, and the family done.

Her older daughters stayed behind to raise the younger brood. They were happy. They tried to be. But they missed him, and how easy things had been when he was still around. When he came crawling back, of course she had to forgive him. Of course.

But things were never quite the same. She told herself their relationship was stronger for weathering this storm, but he would come home sometimes smelling like her — the other woman — or like them — the kids he didn't share with her. An ultimatum was issued. He chose her, because they loved each other, because they were soulmates. Because they had kids to worry about. Mouths to feed.

He was gone again before winter.

He was back again before spring.

The girls were always so happy to see him, so she waited up in the night to have it out with him while they slept. But this passion — why would she fight so hard if she didn't care? If she didn't love him? When he said it, it all made sense, and she was still angry but the family was whole —

And then it wasn't. Was again. Wasn't, because he smelled like someone else.

He swore nothing had happened.

He swore it the next time, too.

The next time he left, it was with her screaming at him to just stop lying at his back.

The girls grew. Old enough to find their own paths. She didn't beg them to stay, though she surely wanted to. Even the younger kids were growing restless, sticking around for her rather than the other way around. Sticking around, like her, in the vain hope that he would come back again.

But he didn't, for a long time. And she met a stranger who was as handsome as he was polite. And he was married, of course, and so dedicated to his wife, unlike her own man errante.

They were friends. The girls liked him, too. They were always so happy when he visited. She was, too, until the night he stayed a little too late, and they got a little too close. Then she was ecstatic, and things might've gone on that way except —

That was when he came home. Another shouting match, but this time she harbored a secret guilt of her own. And when he begged and told her she was the only one that mattered, that there could never be anyone else, not really, what was she supposed to do? So he stayed. He stayed until he didn't, and she felt numb, preparing her den alone. He'd never left her pregnant before.

Pregnant and alone.

"Visits" with her "friend" resumed. He was gonna leave his wife, he said. She didn't believe him, but she let him pretend she did.

But he came back to see their daughters born. The last set, she told him. She was finished with his bullshit. And as soon as she said it, he finally stepped up. They still fought, still raged — but it was like that first year again. The girls were happy, and she was — something like happy.

She should have known better than to expect that to last.

It seemed she was always waiting on him, no matter how much she pretended she wasn't. Even lying in their bed in the arms of another man, she knew that she was waiting.

So she left.

It's just her and the girls, now, and that stupid kitten he brought them now grown into a cat. No more Daddy — just gifts left to remember him by. She sees him in the girls' faces when the sun hits just right. They ask her why mommy is crying.

She tells herself they're better off alone.