Her eyes didn't leave mine. Waiting. Bracing.
"When you call me Daddy—" I paused, not because I didn't know what to say but because the truth of it was so big it needed to be handled carefully, the way you handled something volatile that could either save you or destroy you depending on how steady your hands were. "When you call me Daddy, something in me lights up. Something that's been dark for a long time. And I want that. I want it in a way that scares me, Molly, because I'm not a man who scares easy, and the depth of how much I want to be that for you, to be your Daddy, your safe place, the person who holds the world at arm's length while you figure out how to exist in it again—it's not small. It's not casual. It's the kind of want that rearranges your life around itself whether you give it permission to or not."
Her lips parted. A tremor moved through her that had nothing to do with withdrawal.
"But." I held her gaze, because she needed to see this part too, the part that cost me something to say. "You are barely a few days out of the worst experience of your life. Your body is still clearing chemicals that someone else put there without your consent. Your nervous system is rewired for survival, and right now, I am the thing your survival instinct has locked onto. I'm your heartbeat, your anchor, the first person who held you when you came out of the dark." I swallowed. "And I need you to understand that there is a very real chance—a chance I have to be honest about even though it makes me want to put my fist through a wall—that what you're feeling right now isn't what you'll feel in three months. Or six months. Or a year."
Something flickered across her face. Not the shutdown I'd feared. Something more complex, like the expression of a woman who was being given a truth she hadn't expected and was trying to figure out where to put it.
"You think I'm confused," she said quietly.
"I think you're grateful. And I think gratitude, when it's this big because someone pulls you off a roof and holds you through withdrawal and cuts your banana into pieces, can feel a lot like love. Can feel a lot like the kind of connection that makes you want to hand someone a name like Daddy and mean it forever." My thumb traced the line of her jaw, and I memorized the way she leaned into the touch, cataloging it alongside the knowledge that this might be temporary, that the woman who leaned toward me now might lean away once she was whole. "And I would rather cut off my own arm than take advantage of that confusion."
"So you don't want me to call you—"
"That's not what I said." The words came out rougher than I intended, raw with the effort of holding two contradictory truthsat the same time. "I said I want it so much it scares me. I said it lights something up. I'm not taking it off the table, Molly. I'm telling you that the table needs to be on solid ground before we put anything on it, and right now, the ground is still shaking."
She was quiet for a long time. Her fingers moved against my chest, not gripping, not clinging, but tracing. Small, absent patterns over my sternum, directly above my heart, like she was writing something in a language only her fingertips understood.
"What if the ground stops shaking," she said slowly, "and I still want it?"
The question cracked something open inside me that I'd been holding together with discipline and good intentions and the constant reminder that she was vulnerable and I was the one with the power, and that power demanded restraint. It cracked, and underneath was something molten and vast and terrifying in its certainty.
"Then I will be right here," I said. "Same bed. Same heartbeat. Same answer to the same name. And it won't be because I rescued you from a rooftop. It'll be because you chose me with clear eyes and a healed heart and the full, uncompromised knowledge that you could walk away and survive without me." I pressed my lips to her forehead, a kiss that lived in the space between restraint and reverence. "That's what I want, Molly. I don't want you to need me because you can't stand on your own. I want you to choose me when you can."
A tear slipped down her cheek and landed on my thumb. She didn't wipe it away. Neither did I. We just let it exist as the evidence of something that hurt and healed in equal measure, the way all real things did.
"For the record," she whispered, and her voice sounded the rusty-engine rumble of a woman rediscovering pieces of herself she'd thought were gone, "I'm traumatized. Yes, my brain chemistry is a disaster. Yes, there's a chance I'm projecting. ButI knew what I wanted before they ever put a needle in my arm, and that surviving what I survived didn't create the wanting. It just burned away every reason I had to pretend it wasn't there."
The silence that followed was the kind that reshaped a room. Full of everything we'd just laid bare between us, every fear and every want and every caveat, spread out on the mattress like a map of territory we'd agreed to cross together, slowly, with our eyes open.
"Then we take it one day at a time," I said, and my voice was not entirely steady, and I didn't care. "One day at a time, one brick at a time, and we build it right. Not in the dark. Not in crisis. We build it in the boring, ordinary daylight where you eat solid food and sleep through the night and tell me what you want because you want it, not because you're afraid of what happens if you don't."
Chapter Seven
Molly
Another three weeks changed everything and nothing.
The bruises faded. That was at least the most visible part of it. The mottled purple on my jaw softened to a sickly yellow, then to a ghost of itself, then to nothing. The restraint marks on my wrists went through the same slow metamorphosis, the angry red giving way to pink, then to a faint silvery scarring that Doc said might fade completely with time and might not. I chose not to think about the might not. I was getting good at choosing what to think about, which was its own kind of victory, hard-won and fragile as spun glass.
I could eat solid food. Small meals, carefully portioned because Xavier still cut things into pieces that bordered on the molecular, and I still pretended not to notice, and the pretending had become a ritual between us, a private language of care disguised as comedy. I'd gained back seven pounds. Doc had weighed me this morning with the same gentle, narrated precision he brought to everything, and when the number came up, Xavier had looked at me like I'd just bench-pressed a truck.
"Seven pounds," he'd said, and the pride in his voice was so disproportionate to the achievement that I'd laughed—a real laugh, the kind that came from my stomach instead of my throat, the kind that still surprised me every time it surfaced, like finding a piece of jewelry you thought had been lost.
The withdrawal was mostly behind me. Mostly. The tremors had stopped, but my sleep was still an occasional minefield—some nights I'd drift off against Xavier's chest and surface eight hours later feeling almost human, and other nights the dreams came, with their fluorescent lights and their needles and Ruby's voice as I lost consciousness, and I'd wake up screaming with my fingernails embedded in Xavier's forearms while he held me and talked me back to the surface. He never flinched. Not once. Just held and talked and waited, and when I'd surface, gasping and disoriented and sick with guilt over the crescents my nails had carved into his skin, he'd show me the marks and say, "Battle scars. Very distinguished. Walker is going to be jealous."
The hormonal chaos Doc had warned about was the gift that kept on giving. My moods swung like a pendulum operated by a drunk toddler fine one moment, weeping the next, furious at nothing an hour after that. The three blood tests had all come back negative for pregnancy, and the relief had been so enormous that I'd cried for forty-five minutes straight while Xavier held me and Doc stood in the doorway looking professionally stoic and personally devastated. Explaining Ihadn't been touched sexually, even though I'd still been violated, was an important line. I was relieved to hear the other girls were okay even though I'd never seen them as they kept us apart. But the fertility drugs had done their damage, and my endocrine system was staging a slow, dramatic protest against being forced into overdrive and then abruptly cut off. Hot flashes. Cramps that bent me double. Emotional volatility that made PMS look like a gentle suggestion. Now that my head was clear, I’d queried the sedation. They’d wanted me pregnant, but surely that wasn’t good for the baby?
Doc had gone really quiet then, and said that once the pregnancy had happened, he doubted they would’ve given me any more. I’d worked out they didn’t care what happened to me afterwards, I didn’t think I would have lived long after I’d given birth. I knew them. I knew Ruby had panicked over something I’d read from her lips. I’d challenged her. I just didn’t remember the rest of it, but it wasn’t important.
Xavier handled all of it. Every mood swing, every crying jag, every middle-of-the-night hot flash where I threw the covers off and then immediately wanted them back. He handled it with the same steady, immovable patience he'd shown on the rooftop, except now there was a texture to it that hadn't been there before, a tenderness that had deepened over four weeks of proximity into something that felt less like rescue and more like devotion. Or maybe that was wishful thinking? Because despite his words, I wasn’t stupid enough not to know he hadn’t signed up for this.
We'd settled into a rhythm. Mornings were oatmeal and the tiny banana or apple pieces and whatever gentle mockery I could muster about his culinary dictatorship. Doc came once a day—morning—and Xavier narrated every examination with the same careful precision, though I'd started needing less narration and more just his hand in mine. Afternoons were the hardest,when the fatigue hit and my body demanded rest but my mind associated sleep with vulnerability, and Xavier would stretch out beside me and tell me stories about his abuela's restaurant or Ranger school or the time Maddox accidentally adopted a three-legged dog during an operation in Bogotá and smuggled it back to base in his duffel bag. Apparently Xavier hadn't worked with the other guys in the same unit, just joint operations. Evenings were quiet, the two of us on the couch in his living room, which I'd graduated to during week three, me tucked under his arm with a blanket over my lap and the TV on low, watching nature documentaries because the narrators' voices were soothing and nothing exploded.
He called me little one. Sweetheart. Baby. Good girl, when I ate all my food or took my medication without being reminded or let Doc draw blood without squeezing Xavier's hand hard enough to fracture bone. I called him Daddy—not constantly, not as a reflex, but in the moments when the walls came down and I was just me, the me underneath, the one who'd wanted this her whole life, even when I didn’t know something was missing. In the dark, when the nightmares retreated and his arms were around me and his heartbeat was under my ear. In the morning, when he brought me coffee with too much cream because Doc said caffeine was okay in small amounts and Xavier had decided that "small amounts" meant the mug had to be more cream than coffee. In the moments between moments, when I forgot to be afraid and the word just fell out of me, natural as breathing.
He always answered. Every time. Always.
