"But Daddy, I'm showing them super counting."
"You can show them tomorrow." He crosses the room in three strides and scoops her up, Theodore and all. Lily protests, but he's already pressing a kiss to her forehead, his hand cradling the back of her head like she's made of something precious, and the protest dissolves into giggles. "Say goodnight."
"Goodnight." Lily waves at the women over his shoulder. "I'll teach you the nine-rule tomorrow. You can do nines on just your fingers too, but it's a different trick."
"I'll hold you to that." Talia grins.
Thorne carries her out, murmuring something low against her hair that makes her laugh again. The kitchen fills with a different kind of silence. The women are watching the empty doorway with expressions I can read. They've just seen something they didn't expect.
"Well." Talia exhales. "That's—not what I pictured."
"He's a good father." Eliza's voice is soft. "Whatever else he is, he's a good father."
"The best," Martha speaks for the first time, her hands still on the dish towel. "That little girl is his whole world. Has been since her mother walked out."
Cassie looks up from her laptop. "The mother left?"
"Two years ago. Right after the diagnosis." Martha's jaw tightens. "Lily was four. Just starting to show signs that something wasn't right. The learning differences. The processing issues. Her mother couldn't handle it. Packed a bag and was gone before the first specialist appointment."
"She abandoned them." Talia's tone is flat, absolute.
"She abandoned them."
The women absorb this. I watch them recalculate: the man they've been briefed on, the father they just witnessed, the single parent raising a sick child while running tactical operations.
"He hasn't dated since." Martha folds the towel. "Hasn't looked at another woman. Just Lily. Just the mission. That's been his whole life for two years."
The words land in my chest in a way I don't examine.
Cassie clears her throat. She's looking at her laptop now, her expression shifting into something more clinical.
"The rollout figures from the preliminary audit." She turns the screen toward the room. "Based on the distribution architecture we're mapping, we're looking at an estimate of around four thousand patients. Maybe more."
My hand stills on the tablet.
"Four thousand?" Eliza's voice is sharp. "That's the scope?"
"That's our working estimate. The full count won't be confirmed until she," Cassie gestures at me, "finishes mapping the complete architecture. But based on the clinical site network and the disbursement patterns, four thousand is the floor."
Four thousand.
The pen in my hand does not move. My lungs do not fill.
I grasped the scope in the abstract. I understood the throughput, the clinic distribution, and the disbursement windows. Four thousand was always a number I could have calculated if I had allowed myself to do the math.
I did not allow myself to do the math.
Four thousand Lily's.
Footsteps in the hall. Heavier now. Deliberate.
Thorne fills the doorway. His eyes find me, a locked-on tracking that has nothing to do with surveillance. Something is different. The mask he wore when he carried Lily out is gone. What's underneath is darker. Hungrier.
"Time to call it."
His voice carries the flat authority that clears rooms, but that's not what makes the women go still. It's the way he's looking at me. The way his jaw is set. The way his hands hang at his sides, fingers flexing.
The women read it. Talia closes her laptop. Eliza pushes back from the table. Cassie's fingers still on the keys. Martha hangs the towel on its hook. They disperse without drama, the choreography of people who know when to leave a room.
