Chapter Eighteen
Molly
The waiting was the worst part. Worse than the floor.
Worse than the six nights. Worse than the silence of an apartment that didn't have his heartbeat in it, because at least during those six nights, I'd known he was alive.
I'd known he was in his truck or in his house or at the club, breathing the same air on the same side of the same city, and the distance between us had been measured in blocks, not in whatever impossible, unknowable distance separated a man on an active operation from the woman who'd just realized—sitting on her living room floor with a croissant on her knee and a stuffed elephant named Gerald serving as her therapist—that she'd been running from the only thing that had ever felt like home.
"How dangerous?" I asked, and the words came out smaller than I'd intended—not the voice of a woman who'd delivered a speech about autonomy on a sidewalk, but the voice of a woman who'd just been told the man she loved was somewhere she couldn't follow, doing something she couldn't see, facing risks she couldn't quantify.
The voice of a Little whose Daddy was gone.
Emily hesitated. The hesitation told me everything. "They're good at what they do, Molly. They're the best."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have." She set her phone down and looked at me with an honesty that was more frightening than any evasion.
"Dion said they'd been tracking this for weeks.
A missing Little. They found her location and they moved.
That's all I know. That's all any of us know until they come back. "
Until they come back. Not when. Until. The conditional tense of a woman who'd loved a soldier long enough to understand that certainty was a luxury the military didn't extend to the people left behind.
"Daddy always comes back," Abby said suddenly, to no one and everyone. "He promised. He promised on Gerald and on pancakes and on the stars, and Gideon doesn't break promises. He doesn't. He—" She stopped. Swallowed. Her arms tightened around the elephant. "He always comes back."
I sat down next to her. Not on the floor this time. On the couch. Close enough that our shoulders touched, and when Abby leaned into the contact—a small, instinctive tilt of her body toward warmth—I let her. Let myself be the solid thing for someone else, even though I was shaking.
"He'll come back," I said. "They'll all come back."
Abby looked at me. Then she took Gerald and placed him very deliberately on my lap.
"Hold him," she said. "He helps."
I held him. The purple elephant was warm from Abby's body heat, and his fur was worn soft in patches from years of being gripped through exactly this kind of waiting, and the weight of him in my arms—small, manageable, a thing designed to be held—did something I couldn't explain and didn't try to.
I just held him and breathed and waited.
Emily's phone buzzed at four and she looked at the screen.
Her face did something complicated—a sequence of micro-expressions that cycled through too fast for me to read—and then she closed her eyes, and her shoulders dropped, and the breath she released was the breath of a woman who'd been holding the weight of the sky and had just been told she could set it down.
"They're safe," she said. "All of them. They have the girl. They're heading back to Salvation."
The sound that came out of Abby was not a word.
It was something between a laugh and a sob and a prayer, a sound that contained the entire spectrum of relief compressed into a single exhalation, and she grabbed Gerald back from my lap with the urgency of someone reclaiming something essential and pressed her face into his worn purple fur, rocking forward on the couch with a motion that was purely, unapologetically Little—a woman who'd been told her Daddy was coming home.
I didn't make a sound. I sat on the couch in my pajamas with my unwashed hair and my trembling hands and my six nights of accumulated wreckage, and I felt the relief move through me like a wave, the kind that knocked you off your feet and rearranged the shoreline.
He was alive. Xavier was alive. He was breathing somewhere on the other side of this city, and the distance between us was about to get smaller, and the terrible, yawning chasm of not-knowing that had opened in my chest the moment Emily said they're on a mission was closing, sealing itself shut with the simple, miraculous fact of his continued existence.
"Gideon says to come to Salvation," Abby said, reading her phone. "The car's still outside."
I knew "the car" was Gideon's particular brand of non-negotiable care—a black SUV driven by a man named Marcus who'd been Gideon's designated driver for years, not because Gideon couldn't drive but because Gideon's definition of protecting his Little extended to ensuring that Abby never had to be in a vehicle without someone he'd personally vetted behind the wheel.
Marcus was quiet, professional, built like someone who'd seen things and decided the best response was to become very good at parallel parking.
He texted to say he was ready when we were because Gideon, like Xavier, planned for the people he loved with the same operational precision he brought to everything else.
I changed out of my pajamas in under three minutes.
Jeans. A clean shirt—mine, my own, but I didn't care about that distinction anymore, didn't care about the careful distinction of mine versus his that I'd been maintaining like a religion for six days.
I pulled my hair back into the braid that was becoming less a hairstyle and more a habit, and my fingers hesitated again at the end where a ribbon would go, and this time—this time—I opened the suitcase I'd never properly unpacked.
The ribbons were at the bottom. Tucked beneath some clothes and the second coloring book I hadn't known I'd saved—the ocean one, with the dolphins and the seahorses and the mermaid on the cover whose expression suggested she'd seen some things but was handling it with grace.
The pink ribbon. The lavender one Abby had given me.
They were tangled together, silk and satin intertwined, and I didn't separate them.
I pulled them both out and held them in my palm and looked at them and felt something shift—not break, not crack, not the structural collapse I'd been fearing, but a settling.
Like a foundation finding its level. Like something that had been misaligned clicking quietly into place.
I didn't put them in my hair. Not yet. But I put them in my pocket, where my hand could find them, where they could be close.
Abby watched me do it. She didn't say anything. She just smiled. A small, knowing, purely Abby smile that contained no judgment and no triumph, only the quiet recognition of someone who'd walked this road and knew what the ribbons in the pocket meant.
Marcus drove us to Salvation in silence.
Emily sat in the front passenger seat, her phone in her hand, her thumb moving in the repetitive scroll-and-check pattern of a woman monitoring an incoming feed for updates.
Abby and I sat in the back. Gerald was between us on the seat, his bow tie slightly askew from the force of Abby's earlier reunion grip, and at some point during the drive Abby's hand found mine.
Small. Warm. Her fingers laced through mine with the unself-conscious ease of someone reaching for comfort, and I held on.
Not because I needed to be held together.
Because as Abby had said, holding someone else's hand was its own kind of standing.
Salvation looked different from the outside than I'd expected.
I'd built it in my imagination from Xavier's descriptions, overheard conversations, the institutional weight of its reputation, and the picture I'd assembled was something between a military compound and a fortress.
The reality was quieter. A converted warehouse in a district that was halfway through gentrification, its exterior unremarkable except for the security cameras mounted at intervals that I recognized as the same commercial grade Boris favored, and a front entrance that required three separate authentication steps before the door released with a soft, pneumatic hiss that sounded like a building exhaling.
Emily led us through a series of hallways with the confidence of someone who knew the layout by heart. She took us up an elevator.
"This is just our room," she said. "Gideon had it set up for us."
She pushed the door open, and the space that revealed itself was everything my apartment wasn't.
Soft. That was the first word that registered.
Soft in a way that was deliberate, curated, intentional in the way Xavier was intentional about everything.
The walls were painted a warm, muted lavender, and the floor was covered in layered rugs—thick, plush things in cream and pale pink that your feet sank into like they were being forgiven for every hard surface they'd ever stood on.
There was a couch, an oversized sectional piled with cushions and blankets in every texture imaginable, velvet and fleece and something that looked like it had been woven from clouds by someone who took their craft seriously.
Fairy lights were strung along the ceiling in loops that cast the room in a warm, golden glow that was nothing like fluorescent and nothing like the flat white of my apartment and everything like the light in Xavier's bedroom on the afternoon I'd dropped a towel and changed my life.