"You going in there or are you going to stand in the kitchen communing with the countertop until Christmas?" Maddox asked, already moving toward the living room with the particular energy of a man whose Little was on the other side of a wall and whose patience for separation had a half-life of approximately forty-five seconds.
"Give me a minute," I said.
Dion leaned against the counter beside me, arms crossed, saying nothing. Dion's silences were their own form of communication—dense, layered, calibrated to the situation with the same precision he brought to everything. This particular silence said: I know what's happening inside you right now, and I'm not going to make you talk about it, but I'm also not going to let you pretend it isn't happening.
"She tried to kiss me this morning," I said, keeping my voice very low. I didn't know why I said it. The words just came out.
Dion's expression didn't change. "And?"
"And I turned my head like a coward and kissed her forehead and told her to be good."
"That's not cowardice. That's discipline."
"It felt like cowardice."
"Most discipline does." Dion uncrossed his arms and listened as Doc’s gruff voice joined the others coming from the living room. "You did the right thing, Xavier. You know you did. She's barely past acute withdrawal. Her hormonal panels are still—"
"I know what her panels are. I have the numbers memorized. I could recite her cortisol levels in my sleep." I pressed both palms flat against the counter and stared at my hands, broad, scarred, steady. The hands that held her every night. The hands that had turned her face away from mine this morning with a gentleness that had cost me more than any op I'd ever run.
Dion looked at me with those dark, unreadable eyes that had seen things neither of us talked about anymore—the failed rescues, the wounds that had redirected the entire trajectory of his life. When he spoke, his voice was low enough that it wouldn't carry past the kitchen.
"The problem would be if you didn't want her, if you were going through the motions of care without the feeling underneath. That would be obligation. What you're describing is something else entirely."
"What if she doesn't—" I couldn't finish the sentence. Couldn't make my mouth form the words that lived in the darkest part of the fear: what if she heals and doesn't want me anymore.
"Then you'll survive it," Dion said, without hesitation, without softness, with the brutal clarity of a man who'd survived things that should have killed him and knew that survival was possible even when it didn't feel like it. "But Zee—" He stepped closer, and his hand gripped the back of my neck the way it had on a dozen extraction points, a dozen rooftops, a dozen moments where the only thing keeping one of us upright was the other'srefusal to let go. "I've watched you sleep sitting up that first week because she needs your heartbeat under her ear. And I've watched her. The way she tracks you across a room. The way her breathing changes when you walk in. The way she says your name." His grip tightened. "That's not a trauma response, brother. That's a woman falling in love with the man who caught her, and the fact that the catching happened during a crisis doesn't make the love less real. It just means you're going to have to be patient enough to let her prove it."
I exhaled. Long and slow and shaking, the way I'd taught Molly to breathe through the panic. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay," Dion said and released my neck. And just like that, the moment was over, folded away into the space between us where all the important things lived. Unspoken, unfinished, but understood.
From the living room, I heard Emily's voice rise in theatrical outrage: "The otters were NOT cheating, and I will die on this hill—"
Maddox's low laugh rumbled underneath it, and I could picture Clare probably already in his lap or tucked against his side.
“Come on,” Dion said, and I followed him through. The living room looked like a craft store had been hit by a small, joyful tornado. Doc was sat in the corner grinning like a proud grandad.
Coloring pages covered the coffee table. A rabbit in a garden that had somehow become an underwater scene, a princess in a neon dress that defied every law of color theory, mandalas in careful, meditative patterns that had Clare's steady hand all over them. Stickers everywhere. Cat stickers. Holographic stars on the corners of pages. A smug Siamese that I was fairly certainwas supposed to be Dion, based on Emily's expression when I glanced at it. Pencil shavings dusted the surface like confetti, and in the middle of all of it—curled into the corner of the couch that had become hers, wearing my black t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants that were rolled three times at the ankle, with a colored pencil still loosely held in her fingers and her eyes at half-mast—was Molly.
"Hey," I said. Casual. Easy. Like my chest wasn't a war zone.
"Hey." Her voice was drowsy, warm at the edges despite the smile. She was crashing. I could read it in the heaviness of her eyelids, the way she'd sunk deeper into the couch cushions, the slight lag between my greeting and her response. The coloring and the socializing and the sandwiches had used up whatever reserves she'd built, and her body was calling in the debt.
"Someone's ready for a nap," Maddox observed from the armchair, where Clare had migrated onto his lap with the territorial certainty of a cat claiming a sunbeam. His arm was around her waist, his chin resting on the top of her head, and the picture they made—big and small, steady and bright—was so natural it looked like they'd been assembled from a kit.
"I'm not tired," Molly said, and the yawn that immediately followed was so perfectly timed it could have been scripted. Clare pressed her lips together. Emily didn't bother hiding her grin.
"You had a busy morning with Clare and Emily," I said, crossing to the couch and crouching in front of her, my forearms on my knees, putting myself at her eye level. This close, I could see the fatigue written into every line of her face. The bruised shadows deepening, the slight droop at the corners of her mouth, the way she was fighting to keep her eyes open with the particular stubbornness I'd come to recognize as Molly's version ofI will not surrender this moment even though my body is staging a coup. "That's a full day by anyone's standards."
"The otters did the heavy lifting," she mumbled.
"Come on." I held out my hand. "Nap time."
She looked at my hand. Then at me. And I saw the hesitation, the micro-flinch, the memory of this morning sitting between us like a third person in the room. She was thinking about the kiss. About my turned head. Aboutbe goodand the forehead and the message she'd received that I hadn't meant to send.
I kept my hand out. Steady. Open. The same offer I always made. A choice, not a command.
