Chapter Seven #2
"Xavier." I used his name deliberately, not Daddy, but his name, because this was a conversation between two adults and I needed him to hear me as one, even if the Little inside me wanted to crawl into his lap and pretend the phone call hadn't happened.
"I heard you. I wasn't trying to listen, but you need to go back.
Walker has been covering for you. There's a new case—a Little who needs to be found. People are depending on you."
He set the mug down. The ceramic made a precise, controlled sound against the granite—the sound of a man placing things carefully because the alternative was slamming them.
"You're depending on me too."
"I know. And I'm so much better than I was. Doc said the withdrawal is essentially complete. I can eat. I can walk to the living room without my legs giving out. I slept nine hours last night without a nightmare, which is practically a record—"
"Four hours," he corrected quietly. "You slept four. You woke up at two and again at three-thirty. You don't remember because both times I talked you back down before you fully surfaced."
Oh.
The knowledge of that—of him awake in the dark, monitoring my breathing, catching my nightmares before they could fully form and gently redirecting me back to sleep—settled over me with a weight that was equal parts gratitude and guilt.
"That's my point," I said, and my voice came out smaller than I intended.
"You can't keep doing this. You haven't slept a full night in weeks.
You have a job. You have people who need you—a team, clients, a Little out there somewhere who's waiting for someone to come find her the way you found me. You can't just—"
"Watch me."
Two words. The same two words he'd said that first night when I told him I couldn't let go.
The same absolute, gravitational certainty.
But this time I couldn't just collapse into it, because the Maria-shaped voice in my head—the one I'd been fighting for weeks, the one that whispered burden and imposing and he didn't sign up for this—was using his exhaustion as evidence.
"I'm not saying I leave," I said carefully, and my fingers were white around the mug, and I could hear my own heartbeat, fast and frightened. "You can go to work. During the day. I can—"
"You can what?" He wasn't angry. His voice was patient in the way it always was, but underneath the patience was something harder, not directed at me, I realized, but at the situation.
At the fact that the world was demanding things of him that competed with the thing he'd chosen.
"Sit here alone and try not to spiral when the refrigerator makes a sound you don't recognize?
Have a panic attack with no one to talk you through it, and Doc is a brilliant physician but he's not—"
He stopped. Pressed his lips together. Looked away, and in the brief moment his gaze wasn't on me, I saw the exhaustion he'd been hiding, the way you saw something you'd been looking at every day but not registering.
The shadows under his eyes weren't just dark circles anymore.
They were trenches. The lines around his mouth were deeper than they'd been even two weeks ago.
His shoulders, always so square, had a subtle forward curve that spoke of muscles held rigid for too long without relief.
He was burning out. For me.
"He's not you," I finished for him. Quietly. "That's what you were going to say."
His jaw worked. He picked up the mug again, took a sip, set it down.
"The Little they're looking for," he said finally. "Her name is Penny. She's twenty-two. She aged out of foster care three years ago, and six months ago she was recruited by what she thought was a job placement program. It wasn't."
"You need to find her," I said. It wasn't a question.
"The team needs to find her. And the team is very good at what they do. They don't need me physically present for that operation."
“But they might need Walker,” I said pointedly, “except he’s doing your job because you’re here.” He met my gaze.
"Go," I said. "Go to work tomorrow. Do the briefing.
Help find Penny." I set my mug down and looked at him, really looked, the way he'd taught me to look at things by narrating them into manageable pieces.
"I'll be here when you come back. In your bed. Probably holding the pillow hostage. Katya’s always asking to visit, and Maddox says Clare wants to come again when I’m ready. "
He crossed the kitchen in three strides, the same three strides that carried him to the bedroom every time I woke up screaming, and his hands cupped my face with a tenderness that made my breath stutter.
"If I go," he said, his thumbs tracing my cheekbones, "I'm setting up a direct line. Phone, earpiece, whatever you want. You call me and I answer. No delay. No 'I'll call you back.' I answer."
"Okay."
"And Doc stays. All day. In the house."
"Actually," I paused. “What if Clare and Emily come?” I’d met them once when I was too out of it to talk. His eyebrows rose. Not much, because Xavier's eyebrows operated on a scale of millimeters, but enough that I knew the suggestion had surprised him.
"Clare and Emily," he repeated, like he was tasting the names, testing them for structural integrity. "Dion's Little and—"
"Maddox's Little. Yes." I twisted my fingers together in my lap, a nervous habit I'd developed somewhere in the last two weeks to replace the fist-clenching that Doc said was contributing to the tension headaches. "I’d like to meet them properly.” Meet people that might understand what I was feeling.
"Please," I said. "Call them. For tomorrow. And go to work."
He studied me for a long moment in that deep, searching way that always made me feel like he was reading a page of me that I hadn't known was written.
Then he lifted my hand to his mouth and pressed his lips to my knuckles, right over the scars from where I'd split them on his Kevlar plates, and the gesture was so achingly tender that my vision blurred.
"Yes, baby girl," he murmured against my skin, and the warmth of his breath on my fingers followed me for the rest of the day, like a handprint left in sunlight.
The next morning, Xavier left for work.
It was the hardest thing I'd done since the rooftop, and I wasn't even the one leaving.
He'd prepared for it like a military operation—because of course he had. Doc was stationed in the living room with his medical bag and a novel he was pretending to read until Clare and Emily got here, then he’d leave.
"People" would be stationed outside. The direct line was set up on a phone Xavier had placed on the nightstand, pre-programmed with his number and Gideon's and Doc's and Katya's. He’d left me a note propped to it.
Your name is Molly Gilbertson. You are in my house. It's Wednesday. I'll be home by 1. The banana pieces in the fridge are NOT too small. - Daddy
I laughed when I read it. Then I cried. Then I laughed again, which was becoming a pattern that Doc probably had a clinical term for but that I'd started thinking of as just the way I work now.
Xavier stood in the bedroom doorway in clothes I'd never seen him wear—not the tactical gear of the rescue or the soft T-shirts and sweats of the past two weeks, but actual work clothes.
Dark jeans. A charcoal shirt that stretched across his shoulders in a way that made my brain short-circuit in a manner entirely unrelated to trauma.
"Come here."
I set the mug down and went to him, and he folded me against his chest the way he always did, completely, like he was trying to surround me with himself.
His chin rested on top of my head, and I breathed him in.
Cedar. Coffee. The faint, sharp scent of whatever soap he used.
The scent profile of everything I needed in the world.
"Be brave for me," he murmured. "Just for today. Just until one."