I blinked. "Why what?"
"Why are you building independence?"
"Because I need to know I can take care of myself." The answer was automatic. Practiced. The answer I'd given Anna, given myself, given Xavier through the window of his truck. "Because I can't be with someone if I can't stand on my own first. Because—"
"But you don't want to stand on your own." Abby said it the way she said everything—without malice, without judgment, with the simple, unvarnished clarity of a person whose brain processed truth faster than tact. "You want to be Xavier's Little. And Xavier wants to be your Daddy. And being someone's Little isn't the same as not standing. It's standing with someone holding your hand. Which is actually harder because you have to trust them not to let go, and trust is—" She paused. Frowned. Looked at Gerald as if consulting notes. "Trust is the bravest kind of standing there is. Trust is learning that they won’t let go.”
I gaped. All the objections I had never even made it to my throat, never mind my lips.
"It's not that simple," I said, but my voice had lost its conviction. The certainty I'd been wearing like armor was developing hairline fractures, and through them I could feel something warm pressing in, something that felt dangerously like the truth.
"It is, though." Abby pulled Gerald closer against her chest and rested her chin on his purple head, and her green eyes were luminous and steady and utterly without guile. "I know because I used to think the same thing. Before Gideon. I was in the system—the foster system—and I thought needing someone was the worst thing you could do. Because every time I needed someone, they left. Or they hurt me. Or they were never really there at all, and the needing was just me talking to an empty room."
Emily's hand moved to Abby's knee. A quiet, grounding touch. Abby covered it with her own, Gerald shifting to accommodate the rearrangement, and the gesture was so natural, so practiced, that it was clear this was something they'd done before—this holding of each other during the hard parts. And I remembered my life in the foster system with such clarity at that moment it hurt. I’d never been abused. I’d never been mistreated. But I’d never been loved either.
"Gideon didn't fix me," Abby continued. "I want to say that first because people always think that's the story—broken girl, strong man, fixed. But that's not what happened. What happened is Daddy saw me. Not the version of me that tried to be normal. Not the version that learned how to mask and how to sit still and how to not say the thing I was thinking even though I'd already said it in my head and couldn't always tell if it had come out my mouth yet." She paused, blinked, and then added, "Which is why I sometimes confuse people. Becausethe conversation I'm having in my head and the conversation I'm having out loud aren't always the same thing. But Gideon learned that. He learned my language.”
She looked at me. Not through me, not past me, not at the surface of me. At me. The way Xavier looked at me. The way that made me feel like every layer I'd built. Every careful, protective shell of I'm fine and I'm managing and I'm building independence was transparent, and what lived underneath was visible to anyone brave enough to look.
"Needing Gideon doesn't make me weak," Abby said. "It makes me Abby. It's how I'm built. My brain works differently, and part of how it works is that it works better with him. Not because I can't function—I can function. I functioned for twenty-two years before I met him. I survived the system and I survived things that—" A shadow crossed her face, brief and quickly replaced by something fiercer. "I survived. I can survive. Surviving was never the question. The question is whether surviving is enough. And it's not, Molly. It's not enough. Surviving is just... existing with your teeth clenched. And you—" She pointed at me with the hand that wasn't holding Gerald, her index finger steady, her gaze unwavering. "You are sitting on the floor of an apartment that makes you sad, surviving, and you're calling it independence. And I don't understand why you would choose that when the person who makes your brain quiet and your body safe and your heart—" She pressed Gerald against her chest. "Your heart full. When that person is sitting in a truck outside your building because he can't be farther away than that and still breathe."
"But I—" My voice cracked. "I was in the system too. I was passed around and nobody chose me and nobody stayed, and I learned that the only person you can count on is yourself, and if I go back to him now, if I go back before I've proven I can—"
"Proven to who?" Abby asked.
The question stopped me cold.
"To... myself. To Xavier. To—"
"Xavier didn't ask you to prove anything at the end." Abby's brow furrowed with the intensity of someone working through a logic problem that didn't add up. "Xavier asked you to choose him. And then you said he was wrong about asking, and he agreed. And then you decided to prove something nobody was asking for anymore, and now you're both miserable, and Gerald thinks—" She glanced down at the elephant, then back at me. "Gerald thinks you're making this too complicated."
My throat was closing. The croissant sat untouched on my knee, and my hands had stopped trembling. Not because the tremor had resolved but because my whole body had gone very, very still, the way it went still when something true was approaching and every part of me needed to be quiet enough to hear it.
I stood up and caught the pastry before it hit the floor. The sudden urgency. The need. The self-hatred for pushing the person that loved me the most away. “I need to call him.”
Emily looked at Abby then back at me. “You can’t right now. They’re on a mission. They’ve gone to do a rescue.”
How I didn’t immediately throw up I would never know. Because finally I knew I wasn’t meant to live without him, and there was a real chance he wouldn’t stay alive long enough for me to tell him.
Chapter Eighteen
Molly
The waiting was the worst part. Worse than the floor. Worse than the six nights. Worse than the silence of an apartment that didn't have his heartbeat in it, because at least during those six nights, I'd known he was alive. I'd known he was in his truck or in his house or at the club, breathing the same air on the same side of the same city, and the distance between us had been measured in blocks, not in whatever impossible, unknowable distance separated a man on an active operation from the woman who'd just realized—sitting on her living room floor with a croissant on her knee and a stuffed elephant namedGerald serving as her therapist—that she'd been running from the only thing that had ever felt like home.
"How dangerous?" I asked, and the words came out smaller than I'd intended—not the voice of a woman who'd delivered a speech about autonomy on a sidewalk, but the voice of a woman who'd just been told the man she loved was somewhere she couldn't follow, doing something she couldn't see, facing risks she couldn't quantify. The voice of a Little whose Daddy was gone.
Emily hesitated. The hesitation told me everything. "They're good at what they do, Molly. They're the best."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have." She set her phone down and looked at me with an honesty that was more frightening than any evasion. "Dion said they'd been tracking this for weeks. A missing Little. They found her location and they moved. That's all I know. That's all any of us know until they come back."
Until they come back. Not when. Until. The conditional tense of a woman who'd loved a soldier long enough to understand that certainty was a luxury the military didn't extend to the people left behind.
"Daddy always comes back," Abby said suddenly, to no one and everyone. "He promised. He promised on Gerald and on pancakes and on the stars, and Gideon doesn't break promises. He doesn't. He—" She stopped. Swallowed. Her arms tightened around the elephant. "He always comes back."
I sat down next to her. Not on the floor this time. On the couch. Close enough that our shoulders touched, and when Abby leaned into the contact—a small, instinctive tilt of her body toward warmth—I let her. Let myself be the solid thing for someone else, even though I was shaking.
