But four weeks also meant that the world outside Xavier's house had continued to exist, and it was getting louder.
I heard it for the first time on a Tuesday morning, which was fitting, since Tuesdays had become a landmark in my new life, the day of the week Xavier had given me as my first anchor. I was in the kitchen, sitting at the table with my hands wrappedaround the too-creamy coffee, feeling almost normal in a way that still startled me. Xavier was in the hallway just outside the kitchen, his phone pressed to his ear, and he'd pulled the door mostly shut, not closed, never closed, because we'd established early on that closed doors between us were a boundary my nervous system wasn't ready for.
I wasn't trying to eavesdrop. But weeks of hypervigilance had left me with hearing that could pick up a whispered conversation through drywall, and Xavier's voice—usually so controlled, so deliberately modulated, had an edge to it that I'd never heard directed at anything other than my medical updates.
"I know Walker’s covering for me, Gideon. I know that." A pause. The sound of him pacing, his socked feet on the hardwood. "I need to organize some interviews for an evening manager." Another pause, longer this time. "We have a new Little to find?"
Silence. Then a sharp exhale through his nose, the sound he made when he was processing information he didn't like. I knew that was what they did. As well as everything else. Found people like me.
"That's exactly the kind of corner-cutting that—" He stopped. Listened. More silence. More pacing. I stared into my coffee and felt something cold settle in my stomach that had nothing to do with withdrawal.
"Give me a couple more days. I’ve been speaking to Carlton every day. Just hold the line, Gid. I'll figure it out." I knew Carlton was one of his managers at Kingdom, the huge nightclub where I’d used my lip-reading skills, and instead of going for help, I’d challenged Ruby about it. In my defense, I’d expected a reasonable explanation. That they weren’t really talking about “securing” a new girl.
The call ended. When he pushed the door open and walked back into the kitchen, his face was the neutral mask he worewhen he was managing something he didn't want me to worry about. I knew that mask. I'd been studying his face for four weeks with the obsessive attention of someone learning a new alphabet, and every micro-expression was a letter I'd committed to memory.
"How's the coffee?"
"More cream than coffee, as usual." I wrapped both hands tighter around the mug. "Your commitment to dairy is truly heroic."
He smiled, but it didn't quite reach the furrow, and reached for his own coffee.
"You need to go back to work," I said.
The mug paused halfway to his lips. His eyes found mine over the rim, and I saw the rapid assessment of how much I'd heard, how much I'd understood, how much damage the information was going to do to the fragile ecosystem we'd built in this kitchen with its tiny banana pieces and its too-creamy coffee.
"That's not something you need to worry about."
"Xavier." I used his name deliberately, not Daddy, but his name, because this was a conversation between two adults and I needed him to hear me as one, even if the Little inside me wanted to crawl into his lap and pretend the phone call hadn't happened. "I heard you. I wasn't trying to listen, but you need to go back. Walker has been covering for you. There's a new case—a Little who needs to be found. People are depending on you."
He set the mug down. The ceramic made a precise, controlled sound against the granite—the sound of a man placing things carefully because the alternative was slamming them.
"You're depending on me too."
"I know. And I'm so much better than I was. Doc said the withdrawal is essentially complete. I can eat. I can walk to the living room without my legs giving out. I slept nine hours last night without a nightmare, which is practically a record—"
"Four hours," he corrected quietly. "You slept four. You woke up at two and again at three-thirty. You don't remember because both times I talked you back down before you fully surfaced."
Oh.
The knowledge of that—of him awake in the dark, monitoring my breathing, catching my nightmares before they could fully form and gently redirecting me back to sleep—settled over me with a weight that was equal parts gratitude and guilt.
"That's my point," I said, and my voice came out smaller than I intended. "You can't keep doing this. You haven't slept a full night in weeks. You have a job. You have people who need you—a team, clients, a Little out there somewhere who's waiting for someone to come find her the way you found me. You can't just—"
"Watch me."
Two words. The same two words he'd said that first night when I told him I couldn't let go. The same absolute, gravitational certainty. But this time I couldn't just collapse into it, because the Maria-shaped voice in my head—the one I'd been fighting for weeks, the one that whisperedburdenandimposingandhe didn't sign up for this—was using his exhaustion as evidence.
"I'm not saying I leave," I said carefully, and my fingers were white around the mug, and I could hear my own heartbeat, fast and frightened. "You can go to work. During the day. I can—"
"You can what?" He wasn't angry. His voice was patient in the way it always was, but underneath the patience was something harder, not directed at me, I realized, but at the situation. At the fact that the world was demanding things of him that competed with the thing he'd chosen. "Sit here alone and try not to spiral when the refrigerator makes a sound you don't recognize? Have a panic attack with no one to talk you through it, and Doc is a brilliant physician but he's not—"
He stopped. Pressed his lips together. Looked away, and in the brief moment his gaze wasn't on me, I saw the exhaustion he'd been hiding, the way you saw something you'd been looking at every day but not registering. The shadows under his eyes weren't just dark circles anymore. They were trenches. The lines around his mouth were deeper than they'd been even two weeks ago. His shoulders, always so square, had a subtle forward curve that spoke of muscles held rigid for too long without relief.
He was burning out. For me.
"He's not you," I finished for him. Quietly. "That's what you were going to say."
His jaw worked. He picked up the mug again, took a sip, set it down.
