"Because as a soldier there's been many times people needed me to stay and I couldn't. And I've spent six years trying to make up for it in ways that don't actually fix anything." His fingers traced the shell of my good ear, feather-light. "This fixes something. Being here fixes something. I don't know how to explain it better than that."
I understood it anyway. The way broken recognizes broken. The way two jagged edges can sometimes fit together not because they were designed to, but because the breaking made them compatible in ways wholeness never could have.
The second wave of withdrawal hit harder than the first. The tremors escalated into something that felt like being shaken by invisible hands, my muscles contracting so violently that my back arched off the mattress and Xavier had to hold me down even gently, always gently, his hands firm but never cruel, his voice a constant thread ofI'm here, it's okay, this is your body healing, I know it doesn't feel like it but this is you getting better.
At some point during the worst of it, when the shaking was so bad my teeth were chattering and I couldn't form words and the world had narrowed to a pinpoint of pain and fear—at some point, in the space between one spasm and the next, I lost my grip on who I was supposed to be. What I was allowed to say.
"Daddy."
Not a decision. Not a conscious choice. Just the most honest thing my body knew how to say when every pretense had been stripped away and all that was left was the raw, howling need at my center.
Xavier didn't freeze. Didn't pull back. Didn't do any of the things that the rational part of my brain—the part currently buried under layers of withdrawal and terror and eight weeks of systematic dehumanization—expected him to do.
He pulled me closer.
His arms came around me like the walls of a fortress, and his hand cradled the back of my skull, and his mouth was against my temple when he said, "I'm here, little one. Daddy's here. I've got you. You're safe."
And the sound that came out of me wasn't a scream or a sob or any of the broken noises I'd been producing since the rooftop. It was something quieter than all of those. Something that lived deeper. A keening exhale that carried every ounce of fight out of my body and left behind only surrender—not the terrifying kind, not the kind they'd forced on me with needles and restraints, but the other kind. The kind I'd watched on my laptop with my heart in my throat and my fingernails digging crescents into my palms. The kind that meant someone else was holding the weight now, and I could finally, finally put it down.
The tremors didn't stop. But they changed. Instead of my body fighting against itself, it felt like it was fighting toward something, toward his warmth, his solidity, the gravitational pull of his voice saying those words in that tone that rewired something fundamental in my nervous system.Daddy's here.Two words that shouldn't have had the power to do what they did, but my body didn't care about what should or shouldn't. My body only knew that for the first time in fifty-six days, someonewas holding me like I mattered, and they'd answered when I called.
"Don't let go," I managed through chattering teeth. "Please, Daddy, don't let go."
"Never." His voice was rough. Not the controlled steadiness I'd been clinging to—something rawer underneath, something that cracked at the edges like he was holding himself together with the same white-knuckled determination I'd been using to hold on to him. "Never, baby. I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere. You just hold on to me and let your body do what it needs to do."
So I did.
I held on, and I shook, and I cried, and I called him Daddy in a voice that didn't sound like mine, or maybe it sounded more like mine than anything had in eight weeks. Because this was the me that existed underneath all the armor I'd built, the me that had stood outside Katya's playroom and ached with a wanting so deep it had no bottom.
He held me through all of it. When the shaking peaked and I thought my spine was going to snap from the force of the contractions, he wrapped his legs around mine and pinned me against him, not restraining but containing, his body a compression vest made of muscle and warmth. When the nausea hit again and I barely made it to the basin he'd positioned on the nightstand, he held my hair and wiped my mouth with a damp cloth and didn't let me apologize.
"Don't you dare say sorry," he murmured, smoothing the cloth across my forehead. "You have nothing to be sorry for. Not a single thing."
"I'm disgusting," I whispered.
"You're healing. Healing is messy. Doesn't make it disgusting." He tipped my chin up with one finger—gently, so gently, like he was tilting a soap bubble—and looked me in the eyes. His were dark brown, almost black in the low light of the bedroom,and there was something in them that I didn't have a name for yet. Something vast and fierce and tender all at once, like an ocean viewed from a safe harbor. "You're the bravest person in this room, Molly. You've been the bravest person in every room you've been in for the last eight weeks. And I need you to be brave for a little while longer, because this withdrawal is going to get worse before it gets better, and I need you to trust me to get you through it."
"I trust you." The words came so easily they frightened me. I didn't trust anyone. I hadn't trusted anyone since the van, since the first needle, since Ruby's smile that never reached her eyes. But I trusted him. I trusted the heartbeat and the cedar smell and the way he narrated the world into survivable pieces and the way he'd called melittle onelike it was the most natural thing he'd ever said.
His thumb swept across my cheekbone, catching a tear I hadn't felt fall. "Good girl."
The warmth that bloomed through me at those words was almost enough to override the withdrawal. Almost. Not quite—my body was still staging its chemical rebellion, my hands still trembling, my muscles still firing in random, painful bursts—but the warmth carved out a space inside the misery where something else could exist. Something small and flickering and desperately fragile.
Hope.
I hated it. Hope was the cruelest thing they could have left me with, because hope was what had kept me alive in those rooms and hope was what had nearly destroyed me when day after day passed and no one came. Hope was the voice that whisperedsomeone's looking for youwhile the fluorescent lights buzzed and Ruby adjusted the IV drip and Clive checked his watch. Hope was a liar and a torturer, and I had sworn I was done with it.
But here it was anyway, curled up in my chest like a cat that refused to be evicted, purring against the steady rhythm of Xavier's heart.
Doc came in again. I was losing track of the visits, they blurred together in a haze of gentle hands and quiet voices and Xavier's constant narration. This time he brought broth. Actual broth, warm and golden in a ceramic mug, and the smell of it hit my empty stomach like a revelation.
"Small sips," Xavier said, holding the mug while I wrapped both trembling hands around his. The ceramic was warm against my frozen fingers, and the first sip of broth was so overwhelmingly good that tears spilled down my cheeks for what felt like the hundredth time. Salt and warmth and something that tasted like chicken and home and everything I'd been denied. "Slow. Don't rush it."
I managed about a third of the mug before the nausea threatened again, and Xavier set it aside without comment, without disappointment, without any of the reactions I'd been bracing for. He just wiped my chin with his thumb and said, "That was perfect. You did so well."
And there it was—the pattern I was beginning to recognize. The wall of care, built one small brick at a time.Good girl. You did so well. That was perfect.Each phrase a brick, each brick a piece of the foundation he was laying beneath me, so gradually and so steadily that I was standing on solid ground before I realized I'd been falling.
"I need to tell you something," I said, when the broth had settled and the tremors had subsided to a manageable vibration and I was tucked against his side with his hand in my hair again. My voice was steadier than it had been. Still wrecked, still a shadow of itself, but steadier. "About what I said. What I called you."
