The first stroke was terrible. Wobbly and uncertain, veering outside the line almost immediately, the green trailing off into white space like a sentence that lost its nerve halfway through. I stared at it and felt my cheeks flush with a shame that was wildly disproportionate to the situation. It was a coloring book, not a doctoral thesis, and the rabbit didn't care if its garden was crooked.
"Perfect," Clare said, and she meant it. I could hear that she meant it the way I could hear Xavier's sincerity when he said good girl. Not as a performance, not as encouragement designed to manage my fragility, but as a genuine response to something she found worthy of praise.
"It's outside the line," I said.
"So?" Emily was already bent over the princess book, her purple gel pen moving with the confident, looping strokes of someone who'd long since stopped caring about lines. "Lines are suggestions. Dion tried to tell me once that coloring was about precision and focus, and Maddox threw a crayon at his head."
I laughed. It was small and surprised, like something my body had forgotten it could do and was cautiously, wonderingly remembering.
I colored the rabbit's garden. Slowly, stroke by trembling stroke, the green pencil filling in leaves and stems, while Clare worked on the mandala book beside me with a quiet focus that felt like meditation, and Emily provided a running commentary on her princess's wardrobe choices that were so absurd and so specific that I kept having to stop coloring because my shoulders were shaking with laughter.
"She's clearly a winter," Emily said, holding up her page to show a princess whose dress she'd colored in a riot of clashing neons. "But the kingdom's fashion advisor is stuck in a summer palette mindset, and honestly? That's the real villain of this story."
"The dragon on the next page might disagree," Clare murmured, not looking up from her mandala.
"The dragon is an ally. The dragon understands accessorizing."
I reached for a different pencil—yellow, the color of the butterflies that hovered above my rabbit's garden—and something happened as my fingers closed around it. Something so small and so seismic that I almost missed it. The trembling in my hand eased. Doc said it might persist for weeks, but it eased, the way a clenched muscle eased when warmth was applied. Like the act of choosing a color, of filling in a wing, of creating something soft and small and purposeless, was its own kind ofmedicine, working on a system that pharmaceuticals couldn't reach.
My eyes burned. I blinked hard and focused on the butterfly's wing, on the way the yellow pencil moved across the page in strokes that were still unsteady but were my choice, my hand, my color, my creation. After eight weeks of having every choice stripped away, of being a vessel for someone else's agenda, the simple act of deciding that this butterfly would be yellow instead of blue or pink or left empty was so profoundly, ridiculously empowering that the tears spilled over before I could stop them, landing on the page and warping the paper into tiny, translucent blooms.
"Oh no," I said, swiping at my eyes. "I'm crying on the rabbit."
"The rabbit doesn't mind," Clare said, and when I looked up, her eyes were bright too. Not with pity but with understanding, the deep and specific understanding of someone who'd cried on her own coloring pages and knew exactly what those tears meant. "He's a garden rabbit. He's used to rain."
That made me laugh and cry at the same time, which made Emily laugh, which made Clare's composure finally crack, and for a few minutes, the three of us sat on Xavier's couch making sounds that were impossible to classify—half grief, half joy, half something that didn't have a name in any language I knew but that lived in the space between broken and healing, the space where you were both at once, and that was allowed.
We colored for over an hour. Somewhere in the middle of it, the princess book got abandoned in favor of the stickers. Emily discovered the cat expression sheet and became so invested in selecting the appropriate feline emotion for each page of my coloring book that it became its own activity. A grumpy orange tabby went next to the rabbit. A wide-eyed calico perched on a flower stem. A smug Siamese surveyed the garden fromthe corner of the page with an expression that Emily insisted captured the exact energy of Dion in a briefing.
"He does that thing," she said, pressing the sticker down with her thumb, "where he looks at you like he already knows what you're going to say and is mildly disappointed that you're going to say it anyway."
"That's terrifyingly accurate," Clare said, studying the Siamese. "Has anyone told him he's a cat?"
"Multiple times. He remains unimpressed."
Clare had moved on from her mandala to teaching me a game she called Color Story, where you picked three colors without looking and then had to create a picture using only those three. My blind draw produced magenta, brown, and a shade of teal that had no business existing outside of a 1980's truck, but Clare insisted it was "mermaid adjacent" and therefore perfect for underwater scenes.
"Your rabbit is now an underwater rabbit," she announced, sliding the paper toward me. "He lives in a coral garden. The butterflies are actually very confused fish."
"I feel like the rabbit should have been consulted about this life change," I said, but I was already reaching for the teal, already imagining the garden transformed—leaves becoming seaweed, flowers becoming anemones, the grumpy orange tabby sticker now inexplicably submerged and looking even more displeased about it. The absurdity of the whole thing was its own kind of therapy, a permission slip to be ridiculous, to be small, to care deeply about the backstory of a cartoon rabbit who'd been involuntarily relocated to an ocean he hadn't signed up for.
By the time Doc appeared in the living room doorway, we'd covered the coffee table in a sprawl of colored pages and sticker sheets and pencil shavings that looked like a craft store had sneezed. He surveyed the scene with an expression that was professionally neutral and personally delighted. I half shook myhead in amusement because his version of leaving clearly meant just retreating to the study.
"I thought you might be hungry," he said, and the wordhungryregistered in my body before my brain caught up—an actual, genuine pang of hunger, not the theoretical awareness of needing food that I'd been operating on for two weeks but the real, physical sensation of a stomach asking to be filled. I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt actual hunger. In the rooms, food had been a delivery system for compliance—eat this, swallow this, hold still. In Xavier's house, food had been medicine, carefully administered in therapeutic doses. But this—this was my body sayingmore, please, and the normalcy of it was staggering.
"I could eat," I said, and the surprise in my own voice made Emily grin.
Doc brought sandwiches. Small ones, crustless, cut into triangles, arranged on a plate with the kind of geometric precision that told me Xavier had left instructions. Turkey and cheese on soft white bread, with a side of apple slices that were cut thin enough to be translucent. Kid food. Little food. The kind of food that didn't require negotiation between my healing stomach and my tentative appetite, and the care embedded in every crustless triangle made my chest do that warm, compressing thing again.
"He pre-made these, didn't he," I said. It wasn't a question.
"Not exactly," Doc said, setting the plate on the coffee table between the sticker sheets and the pencil shavings. "But he left detailed written instructions about bread-to-filling ratio and a diagram of the correct triangle angle. I have a medical degree from Johns Hopkins, and I've never received more thorough preparation guidelines for anything in my career."
Emily pressed her lips together in a way that was clearly suppressing something she wanted to say about men who drewsandwich diagrams at five in the morning for women they supposedly didn't want.
Doc retreated again and Clare giggled. "You really didn't think a Daddy like Xavier would leave us on our own?"
Emily nodded and swallowed. "If Abby had been with us, there would have been a driver and a separate bodyguard." I thought about that. My urge for total independence warring with the side of me that wanted to be cared for, and realized that if these two competent women could choose this sort of relationship without diminishing themselves, then surely I could?
