Vee
I wake up at five in the morning and lie there staring at nothing for an hour before I give up on sleep entirely.
The hearing starts at nine.
It's five-fourteen.
I get up, pad downstairs, and find Rhys already in the kitchen. He's standing at the counter in the dark with a glass of water, looking out the window at nothing. He turns when he hears me on the stairs and his face softens.
He holds his glass out.
I take it and drink half.
We stand in the kitchen in the dark without talking, and it helps more than talking would have.
By seven the whole house is awake and by eight I have made myself unbearable.
I'm not doing it on purpose. I'm just… moving. From the kitchen to the living room to the porch and back, unable to stay anywhere for longer than three minutes, picking things up and putting them down without knowing why I picked them up in the first place.
"Vee," Finn says patiently, watching me rearrange the books on the shelf for the second time. "You're going to wear a hole in the floor."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You've moved those books four times."
"I'm organizing."
"You're catastrophizing. Sit down."
I sit down. Then stand back up forty seconds later.
Malcolm appears in the doorway and takes one look at me. "Chase is going to win."
"You don't know that."
"I do know that. I've seen most of the evidence. It's airtight."
"The registry can be unpredictable. Chase said so himself."
"Chase said that months ago. He's confident now."
"But what if—"
"He's going to win, Vee."
I look at him. "But what if he doesn't? What if they rule in Ragon's favor? What if they decide guardianship stays with him and I have to—" I stop. The words get stuck somewhere in my chest. "Will you hide me? If it goes wrong. Could we just—run somewhere? Go somewhere they can't find us?"
The room is very quiet.
Malcolm crosses to me and takes my face in his hands. His scent wraps around me and I breathe it in deliberately, trying to let it do what it usually does.
"Listen to me," he says. "No one is making you go back to Ragon. I don't care what the registry says. You arenotgoing back there."
"But the flag—Alex's flag—"
"I don't care about the flag,” he says. "If it comes to it, we'll figure something out. But it's not going to come to it."
"Malcolm—"
