Chapter Nine #2
By the time Doc appeared in the living room doorway, we'd covered the coffee table in a sprawl of colored pages and sticker sheets and pencil shavings that looked like a craft store had sneezed.
He surveyed the scene with an expression that was professionally neutral and personally delighted.
I half shook my head in amusement because his version of leaving clearly meant just retreating to the study.
"I thought you might be hungry," he said, and the word hungry registered in my body before my brain caught up—an actual, genuine pang of hunger, not the theoretical awareness of needing food that I'd been operating on for two weeks but the real, physical sensation of a stomach asking to be filled.
I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt actual hunger.
In the rooms, food had been a delivery system for compliance—eat this, swallow this, hold still.
In Xavier's house, food had been medicine, carefully administered in therapeutic doses.
But this—this was my body saying more, please, and the normalcy of it was staggering.
"I could eat," I said, and the surprise in my own voice made Emily grin.
Doc brought sandwiches. Small ones, crustless, cut into triangles, arranged on a plate with the kind of geometric precision that told me Xavier had left instructions.
Turkey and cheese on soft white bread, with a side of apple slices that were cut thin enough to be translucent.
Kid food. Little food. The kind of food that didn't require negotiation between my healing stomach and my tentative appetite, and the care embedded in every crustless triangle made my chest do that warm, compressing thing again.
"He pre-made these, didn't he," I said. It wasn't a question.
"Not exactly," Doc said, setting the plate on the coffee table between the sticker sheets and the pencil shavings.
"But he left detailed written instructions about bread-to-filling ratio and a diagram of the correct triangle angle.
I have a medical degree from Johns Hopkins, and I've never received more thorough preparation guidelines for anything in my career. "
Emily pressed her lips together in a way that was clearly suppressing something she wanted to say about men who drew sandwich diagrams at five in the morning for women they supposedly didn't want.
Doc retreated again and Clare giggled. "You really didn't think a Daddy like Xavier would leave us on our own?"
Emily nodded and swallowed. "If Abby had been with us, there would have been a driver and a separate bodyguard.
" I thought about that. My urge for total independence warring with the side of me that wanted to be cared for, and realized that if these two competent women could choose this sort of relationship without diminishing themselves, then surely I could?
We ate. The sandwiches were perfect—soft and simple and exactly the right size for a stomach still learning its capacity, and I ate two whole triangles and three apple slices before the fullness hit, which was a record that would have made Xavier do that thing where his eyes went soft and proud simultaneously.
I washed it down with a glass of water Doc had brought alongside the plate, and the ordinary domesticity of the moment—eating lunch with friends while coloring pages lay on the coffee table—made the day so much brighter.
After lunch, Emily pulled out a card game with illustrated animals on the front that she called "Little Zoo," which turned out to be a simplified version of rummy where each suit was a different animal family and the goal was to collect complete families before anyone else.
The rules were simple enough that my still-recovering brain could track them without strain, and complex enough that I had to actually think, which meant I couldn't simultaneously spiral about the kiss or Maria or the fact that Xavier was across the city doing important things while I sat on his couch matching cartoon penguins.
Clare won the first round. I won the second, and the surge of satisfaction that came with laying down my completed otter family was so disproportionate to the achievement that I actually gasped, and Emily threw her remaining cards in the air in mock outrage and declared the otters were cheating.
"Otters can't cheat," I said, gathering my cards to my chest with both hands like they were treasure. "Otters are pure."
"Otters are vicious," Emily countered. "They hold hands while they sleep so they don't drift apart, which sounds cute until you realize it's actually a deeply codependent survival strategy, and honestly? Relatable."
I was laughing, the kind that came from my belly and shook my shoulders and made my eyes water for reasons that had nothing to do with grief, when the yawn hit.
It ambushed me mid-giggle, enormous and jaw-cracking, the kind of yawn that starts in your toes and commandeers your entire body on its way to your mouth.
I tried to cover it with my hand, but it was too late.
Clare had already seen it, and her expression shifted from playful to gently knowing with the speed of someone fluent in the body language of Littles who'd hit their limit.
"Someone's crashing," she said, not unkindly.
"I'm fine," I said automatically, which was blatantly untrue and made us all laugh again, just as we heard the kitchen door open and my heart jumped because I knew Daddy was home.