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And damn it if it doesn’t hit me like a punch to the ribs.

That binder—what’s inside it—it’s everything he’s been forced to carry before anyone ever asked if he could. A documented history of heartbreak. Paper-clipped trauma. A life someone tried to reduce to bullet points and court dates and signatures on dotted lines. I don’t even know what’s in there yet, but I can feel the weight of it in my chest like it’s my own.

Worse, I see it in him—how he braces for it. How he steels himself without flinching, like he’s done this a hundred times and knows better than to hope.

He doesn’t look like a little boy.

He looks like something carved down to the bone just to survive. Like someone who’s never been asked what he wants, only told what comes next. And I hate—hate—how deeply I recognize that look. That instinct to disappear before someone decides you’re too much.

The silence thickens. Rue’s voice drones gently on, but I can’t hear it anymore. All I see is the way Dallas is trying to make himself smaller, as if this couch might open up and let him vanish if he just holds still long enough.

Beside me, Henry shifts.

His leg tenses under my hand. A hand I don’t even realize I’ve placed there until he turns to look at me, brows pulled together in that familiar, silent What the hell are you doing expression he’s perfected over the years.

I keep my eyes forward, voice light.

“Honey, why don’t you go show Dallas his room? Maybe give him the grand tour?”

Henry stares at me, searching my face for some kind of signal. I feel the hesitation in him, the uncertainty. His gaze flicks from me to Dallas and back again, that cautious Are you sure about this? written clear in the furrow of his brow.

I squeeze his knee gently, then dig my nails into the fabric of his jeans—not out of spite, but urgency. A grounding touch. A message only he will understand. I’m not asking. Move.

And because God blessed him with as much brain as cock, he does. He just gives me the smallest nod and turns toward the boy still folded into the couch. He doesn’t crouch or lower his voice, doesn’t try to force friendliness. He just offers it plain and simple, like a door left open.

“Your room’s down the hall,” Henry says, voice low but even. “You want to come see it?”

Dallas doesn’t answer. Doesn’t look at him. But I see the way his fingers tighten on the edge of the cushion, the way his shoulders stiffen like he’s bracing for the worst.

Henry doesn’t press. Just stands and takes a few measured steps toward the hall.

“It’s yours either way,” he says quietly. “Come see it when you’re ready.”

For a moment, nothing moves. The whole room holds its breath.

Then Dallas slides off the couch, silent and cautious, and follows.

I realize I’m still holding my breath, too.

Once they’ve disappeared I drop the act. “Did you really have to pull that out in front of him?” I spit at her, my hand hovering over the fucking binder.

Her cheeks flush a deeper, shameful pink, and her fingers twitch at the chain around her neck, winding and unwinding it like it might save her.

“I—I—” she starts, but I cut her off.

“You think he doesn’t know what’s in that binder?” My voice cuts clean through the air, sharper than I mean it to. “Every report, every shattered home, every fucking failure that’s followed him like a shadow? You think he hasn’t memorized that misery by now?”

She blinks, and her lips part like she wants to speak, to explain, but no sound comes. Just a tight nod, her breath hitching in the back of her throat.

I’m not trying to rip her apart. But Jesus—he’s nine. Nine. And that binder? That binder is every scream he couldn’t escape, every night he didn’t sleep, and a stark God damn reminder he wasn’t enough. It doesn’t just document pain. It is pain.

She flinches like I slapped her, and maybe I did, just not with my hands. Her eyes go glassy, lips parted but frozen, and her breath stutters like she can’t quite remember how to breathe under the weight of it all.

I didn’t want to humiliate her. But that fucking binder might as well be a tombstone. It doesn't just catalog pain—it cements it, makes it permanent. Something cold and clinical that strips his grief down to bullet points.

She nods, stiff, like the motion hurts. And it should. Because now that weight, that sorrow he’s carried his whole damn life? She’s touched it. Mishandled it. The shame on her face tells me she knows it.

“Now, you don’t have to give me the cliff notes, Henny already did that.” He didn’t but he fucking will because I don’t think I can open that fucking binder after watching how much it affected Dallas. I snatch it from the table, and slide it under the couch hard enough I hear it bounce off the wall.