He only listened.
“She didn’t fight them when they took me. That’s always hurt the most, that she didn’t try to keep me, that she didn’t ever try to get clean so she could get me back. She just…let me go, signed me over to the state like I was nothing. Like I was no one to her.” Audrey closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’ve been to therapy. I know that’s what drug addicts do: nothing matters as much to them as their next fix. I could never compare, no matter how much I might have loved her. But I still think some part of her must have cared about me—or at least I really want to think so.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because while she might not have fought for me, while she might not have wanted to take care of me—or couldn’t—my mom still cried really hard when they took me away,” she whispered. “At least, that’s what I was told. I talked to the social worker who was there when I tried to find her after I turned eighteen, and that’s what she said.”
“What about your dad?”
“No idea who he is. There’s no record of him, no name on my birth certificate. Maybe he didn’t want me either.”
Audrey had never said that out loud before.
A knife twisted in her heart.
Theo stayed quiet. He only gazed at her, his eyes deeply sad, until he sat up sharply and ran a single hand over his face with a sniff. He pushed himself off the bed and limped over to his shelves, opening one of the fabric storage boxes and digging around in it for a moment before replacing the top. He limped back over to the bed with something held behind his back and grabbed the remote for the shades, holding down a button briefly before releasing it. The blackout shades lifted and revealed some of the lights of Manhattan in the distance, twinkling like stars in the night sky, and only partially obscured by the lingering storm clouds.
He slid back into bed and revealed what it was he’d retrieved: a woolly stuffed teddy bear, well loved, but still in good shape. One of his eyes was mismatched, lost long ago but lovingly repaired with a black button sewn expertly into place.
“This is Roo—short for Roosevelt.” He smiled sadly. “My dad gave him to me when I was little to help keep the monsters in the dark away.” He laid down and held it out to her. “I’ll keep them away from you now, but you can borrow him if you want.”
Roo and Theo suddenly blurred in front of her, and Audrey sniffed as she took the bear and held him to her heart. She couldn’t stop the tears anymore, and her chest was wracked with horrible, gut-wrenching sobs as Theo turned out the light again and gathered her in his arms. He kissed her gently through her tears, holding her tightly to his chest and stroking her hair with trembling hands while she cried in his beautiful bedroom.
“I want you, Audrey,” he whispered softly. “I want to keep you. I’d never let you go. I promise.”
Eventually, she quieted, soothed by Theo’s warmth and the gentle lights of the city she’d decided to call home. But even though she’d lived there for six years, it had never quite felt like it all the way; she’d always been a foreigner in New York, a transplant. It was just the latest in a long string of temporary places she gave the moniker to briefly before it was ripped away from her again by the ever-changing currents of life.
But here in Theo’s arms, maybe her definition of home had begun to change. Just the slightest shift, bit by bit, now that she’d revealed herself, and he had too.
Maybe home had never been a place, like she always thought it was.
Maybe it was a person.
The strength of her feelings about that truth could have scared her. Should have, perhaps.
Instead, the heat Theo radiated from holding her so closely, so quietly while she cried only warmed her all the more.
It lit something inside of her.
A tiny flame of hope for something more.
Something new.
And something just as beautiful as the man resting quietly beside her.
Eleven
Warm.
Audrey was so warm, and so comfortable.
The source of the heat shifted around her, and that movement was enough to help her swim out of her heavy early morning drowsiness. She opened her eyes to a strange room, and then she remembered:
This wasTheo’sroom.
She’d stayed over last night.
It wasn’t a dream.
