It was a small sound. The sound of something clicking into place—not loudly, not with fanfare, but with the quiet, inevitable precision of a key finding the lock it was made for.
"There it is," Emily said, and her smile was knowing and sad and warm all at once. "The 'oh.'"
"I hate the 'oh,'" I whispered. "The 'oh' means he's being noble and I'm being unfair."
"The 'oh' means he cares enough to wait," Clare corrected. "The 'oh' means he turned his head this morning not because he didn't want to kiss you, but because he wanted to kiss you so badly that doing it would have shattered every boundary he's set for himself to keep you safe."
I pressed my palms against my eyes. The chamomile was going cold in my mug, and my throat was doing that terrible constricting thing again, but the tears behind it were different this time—not the hot, acidic tears of rejection, but something warmer. Softer.
"He left a note," I said, and I didn't know why I was telling them this except that it felt important—like evidence that needed to be entered into the record, Exhibit A in the case against my own catastrophic thinking. "On the nightstand. With my coffee. He signed it 'Daddy.'"
Emily made a sound that was half laugh, half something that ached. "He signed itDaddy. With a capital D. And you thought he didn't want you."
"In my defense," I said, "my brain has been chemically recalibrated by lunatics, and my baseline for interpreting human behavior is currently set to 'assume the worst.'"
"Fair," Emily conceded. "Completely fair. But now that we've established that Xavier Moreno is not, in fact, rejecting you but is instead performing the most agonizingly noble act of restraint since—"
"Men were invented,” Claire said.
"—since that," Emily agreed. "Now that we've established that, I think it's time we address the real emergency."
I blinked. "What real emergency?"
Emily reached for the oversized tote bag she'd brought in and set it on the coffee table with a decisive thump. The bag was pink—of course it was pink—with a small embroidered unicorn on the front that I recognized as the kind of thing you'd find in a Little's accessories collection, not a regular purse. She unzipped it with the theatrical flourish of a magician opening a hat and began pulling things out one by one, arranging them on the coffee table with the careful precision of someone setting up a field operation.
Coloring books. Three of them—one with mandalas, one with woodland animals, and one that was unmistakably a princess theme with glitter on the cover that caught the light and scattered tiny rainbows across the coffee table. A zippered pouch that, when opened, revealed a set of colored pencils so extensive it could have supplied a small art school. A pack of gel pens in every color the visible spectrum had to offer and several it probably didn't. Stickers—sheets and sheets of stickers, holographic stars and tiny animals and flowers and one sheetthat was entirely composed of different breeds of cats making various expressions.
"Emily," Clare said, in the tone of a woman who'd seen this before and was powerless to stop it.
"What? Dion said to bring activities. These are activities." Emily held up the princess coloring book and waggled it at me. "When's the last time you colored?"
Chapter Nine
Molly
The question hit me hard. Not because it was complicated—it wasn't—but because of what it implied. When's the last time you did something just because it felt good? When's the last time you let yourself play? When's the last time you were small and safe and the only thing expected of you was staying inside the lines?
"I don't—" I started, and my voice sounded strange. Thin and uncertain, like a child being offered a toy she wasn't sure she was allowed to touch. "I haven't. Not since—I mean, I used to colorwith Sasha and Luka. Maria's kids. But that was for them, not for—"
"Not for you," Clare said softly. "That's what I thought."
She reached across the coffee table and picked up the woodland animals book—the one with the fox on the cover, curled in a bed of autumn leaves, its eyes half-closed in an expression of perfect, uncomplicated peace. She opened it to a page near the middle. A rabbit sitting in a garden, surrounded by flowers and butterflies and the kind of serenity that only existed in coloring books and the imaginations of people who hadn't seen what the world could do.
"Here," she said, and placed it in front of me like an offering. Like a door being held open. "You don't have to be good at it. You don't have to stay in the lines. You just have to let yourself do it."
I stared at the rabbit. Its outline was clean and simple, the kind of illustration designed for hands that might not be steady, for people who needed the act of creation to be gentle and forgiving.
"I don't know if I can," I whispered, and I wasn't talking about coloring. I was talking about all of it. The ribbons and the juice boxes and the capital-D Daddy on a note beside my coffee. The world that Clare and Emily inhabited so naturally, the world I'd pressed my face against the glass of for years, wanting so badly that the wanting had become a physical ache I'd learned to live around like a bone that had healed crooked.
"You can," Emily said, and her voice had lost its bubbly energy. What was underneath was something quieter and fiercer. The voice of a woman who'd stood exactly where I was standing and had been terrified of the same things and had stepped forward anyway. "You think you can't because you think being Little is something you have to earn. Something you have to deserve. Something that requires you to be whole and healed and functioning before you're allowed to access it." She picked up agel pen—purple, glittery—and uncapped it with her teeth. "But that's backwards. Being Little isn't the reward for getting better. It's part of how you get better."
She said it so simply. Like it was obvious. Like the sky was blue and water was wet and the soft, small part of me that I'd been protecting behind walls of competence and independence and “I'm fine, I don't need anyone,” wasn't something to be ashamed of but something to be nurtured. Fed. Given coloring books and stickers and a safe place to exist.
I picked up the green pencil.
My hand shook. The tip wavered over the page like a seismograph recording an earthquake only I could feel, and for a moment, I just hovered there, pencil in the air, rabbit waiting, the distance between the two feeling insurmountable.
Then Clare's hand covered mine. Not guiding. Not steadying. Just there—warm and present and anchoring me to the moment the way Xavier's hand on the back of my head anchored me to sleep. She didn't say anything. She just held my hand until the tremor settled into something manageable, and then she let go, and I touched the pencil to the paper.
