Chapter 10
HENRY
Ididn’t trust what people said about themselves. It was too easy to shape—too easy to sand down into something clean enough to pass without being questioned.
Most people learned that early.
Archibald had too.
He was just terrible at it.
Not because he didn’t try, but because his body refused to cooperate.
There was always awareness with him. Something held just beneath the surface—a constant, quiet calculation that never fully shut off.
It showed in the way he carried himself, in the small, automatic corrections.
He was fixing something only he could feel before anyone else had the chance to notice it.
It wasn’t perfect.
Control like that never was.
Archie sat six feet away, half-curled over the small side table I never bothered to use. His laptop was open, one of my article drafts spread beside it in printed pages. The legal pad I’d given him earlier was already crowded with notes in dark, slanted handwriting.
My rabbit worked with his whole body, and I was fucking captivated by it.
When he concentrated, his shoulders would round slightly, as though he was trying to pull the task closer into himself. When he got irritated, that mouth of his pressed into a thin line, and the edge of his pen tapped twice against the page before continuing.
In the thirty-one minutes he’d been here, he adjusted his glasses four times and took exactly three measured sips of water.
He was managing himself.
And I was letting him. For now.
A hand dragged through his hair before reaching for the article again, the pages catching slightly under his fingernails. Beneath the desk, his knee started to bounce, and his mouth curved into a faint frown.
“Something wrong, Rabbit?”
“It’s a little…” He cleared his throat. “It comes off kind of smug.”
“Smug?”
He peeked at me through crooked frames. “Respectfully.”
My lips twitched.
“It reads like you’re trying to prove something. Like you already know you’re right and you want them to know it too.”
The pen tapped once against the margin.
“You are,” he added. “Smarter, I mean. That part’s obvious. It just… doesn’t feel like the point.”
“You’re not worried about offending me?”
“You already hired me.” He shrugged. “Feels worse to lie now.”
I bit back a laugh.
There it was.
That quick, instinctive push—honest, a little sharp, and gone the second it landed. Just enough edge to show teeth before he decided whether it was safe to keep them bared.
My little rabbit.
His gaze drifted back to the paper, teeth catching lightly at his lower lip. The soft pull dragged my attention straight to his mouth—full, damp, and already flushed from the pressure.
Fuck.
I’d told him I wouldn’t kiss him but that sure as shit didn’t make the thought go away.
A quiet huff slipped out of him. “Are you going to do any work or are you just going to sit there and stare at me?”
“I’d much rather stare at you.”
Color climbed his cheeks.
“Besides, I’m tenured.”
He bit down on his lower lip again, trying—and failing—not to laugh.
Deft fingers found the edge of his water bottle, thumb catching on the corner of a peeling sticker. He dragged at it slowly while his gaze snapped back to the article in front of him.
It was fucking cute the way his attention kept slipping sideways.
And even cuter that he thought he was inconspicuous.
“Drink,” I said.
His nose scrunched. “What?”
“Your water.”
His eyes slid to the bottle, and the smallest crease appeared between his brows. “You’re unbelievable.”
“So you’ve said.”
A quiet, incredulous sound escaped him, but he reached for it anyway. The plastic shifted in his grip, lifting as his throat worked with each swallow.
Light caught at the hollow of his neck when he lowered it, just visible above the collar of his shirt. It would take very little to press him back into the chair and feel that rhythm under my hand.
Soon.
He cleared his throat. “Anything else, Professor?”
Everything under my skin reacted to that tone.
“Sit back,” I said.
He blinked. “What?”
“You’re curling over the table. Fix it.”
Head cocking, he stared at me, popping his tongue once off the roof of his mouth before leaning back into the chair slower than a fucking geriatric turtle.
“There. Am I surviving correctly now?”
Oh, this brat.
“Not even close, sweetheart,” I said. “But it’s an improvement.”
The eye roll came quick, but a smile still tugged at the corner of his mouth.
Fucking cute.
His phone buzzed against the desk, the vibration dragging it half an inch across the wood where it lay face down.
Turning it over, he glanced at the screen, and tension pulled tight across his shoulders.
That same tension carried through his throat, a subtle line drawing from his jaw to the base of his neck as he swallowed around nothing.
“Archibald.”
His thumb pressed into the cracked seam of the case, catching on the split plastic like he needed something solid to hold on to.
“It’s my mom.”
I was on my feet before the words finished leaving his mouth. The distance between us closed without thought, my hand finding the back of his chair first, then the table, close enough to see the glow of the screen reflected faintly in his glasses.
A block of text.
A link.
A blurred preview he hadn’t opened.
“She sends these every time.” The words came out uneven. “Every time a kid goes missing.”
His thumb pressed deeper, nail catching against the cracked plastic, worrying the same spot again and again.
“Show me,” I said, voice low enough it didn’t break the space between us.
His grip tightened once more around the phone before loosening, the device shifting in his hand as he turned it slightly toward me without fully letting go.
The message preview expanded under my gaze.
Missing. Possible abduction. Family fears foul play.
My jaw set before I could stop it. Something sharp settled behind my ribs as I took in the rest—timestamps and forwarded links, language dressed up to sound informative while feeding something uglier underneath.
“Does she send commentary with them or just the articles?”
His throat moved. “Sometimes a text. Sometimes… nothing.”
Nothing.
Silence wasn’t neutral in situations like this. It was expectation—a question left open long enough that it stopped being a question at all.
“It just… doesn’t stop. My head gets so loud and it takes days for me to turn it off.”
Another sharp pull hit beneath my ribs, tightening and dragging me forward, instinct taking over with brutal clarity.
Protect. Protect. Protect.
The tips of my shoes touched the edges of his, but he didn’t seem to notice as I lowered into a crouch beside him. The floor took my weight as the distance between us folded inward. I braced one hand against the back of the chair, fingers curling along the wooden edge.
“Archie, baby.”
I was close enough to him now to feel the warmth coming off his body in soft waves—to hear the uneven pull of his breathing before it steadied.
“Henry.”
A quiet exhale burst from between his lips, and then his shoulders followed, loosening and drifting forward until his forehead met my chest with a careful press.
Like he wasn’t sure he was allowed to take the space.
The fabric of my shirt shifted faintly under the weight of him, heat seeping through, his breath catching there—warm, shallow, and brushing through the cotton in uneven bursts.
“She started after Abel. My brother,” he murmured, the words pressed into the fabric between us instead of spoken into the room. “After he—fuck.”
His breath hitched once against my chest. “After he went missing.”
I’d known there was a brother. Jackson Randolph had been stupid enough to drag the wound into the open in the middle of a hallway. I hadn’t pushed for the rest. There were lines I was trying—against my better instincts—to let Archie cross in his own time.
That restraint was being tested.
Sliding my hand from the chair to him, I rubbed circles against his back, fingers spreading between his shoulder blades.
The movement pulled him out of the space he’d folded into, his forehead dragging lightly against my chest as he followed, breath catching mid-motion as his face tilted toward mine.
“There’s my rabbit.”
Eyes met mine, unfocused for half a second before sharpening, something fragile flickering through them before it could be hidden again.
A tremor moved through him, starting high in his shoulders, slipping down his spine in a slow, involuntary shudder that didn’t belong to control or thought.
His body knew.
Even if he didn’t want it to.
My thumb shifted to his jawline, stroking up and down.
“Talk to me, sweetheart.”
“We were in the front yard.” His palms pressed against my chest, fingers curling faintly into my shirt. “I… had the hose. We were spraying each other. He kept missing on purpose ‘cause he thought it was funny.”
Gray eyes blurred, shifting until they held something darker—something that didn’t belong to the present. It moved through him in silence, locking his expression piece by piece.
“He wanted a popsicle. A fucking popsicle.”
Heat pressed closer without intention, his body folding into mine as if proximity alone could hold him together.
“It was orange,” he said, almost absently, like the detail had never left him. “He always picked red first, but there weren’t any left, so I grabbed orange.”
“I told him to wait in the yard,” he whispered. “We’d already had popsicles that day, and Mom never let us have two. I went without him, so if I got caught… he wouldn’t get in trouble too.”
Air stuttered out of him, catching somewhere in his throat before forcing its way free.
“I was only gone a minute. I counted. I remember counting. Fifty-eight seconds. When I came back…”
My hand shifted fully into his hair, fingers threading through the strands at the base of his skull, holding him there while my other hand steadied at his cheek, thumb moving in slow passes against his skin.
“It’s not your fault,” I whispered.
He shook his head against me, denial already building.
“The hose was still running. It was just… spraying into the yard. His favorite basketball was sitting on a mound of grass. I—I thought he was hiding. I thought he was trying to scare me or—”
His breath broke, catching somewhere behind his teeth.
“I called him. Screamed his name over and over and over.”
Silence settled between us again, pressing in from every side.
“I left him there,” he choked. “I told him to wait, and I left him there.”
My grip firmed. “You were gone for a minute.”
“That was enough.”
No.
“That was opportunity,” I corrected. “You were a child, and someone took advantage of that.”
“He—he was seven, Henry. Seven fucking years old.” Spine straightening, he pulled away from me, tearing his glasses off his face to press the heel of his palms against his eyes.
“The clinical, academic Archie knows it wasn’t my fault, but the what-ifs have been on a loop in my brain for fifteen years.
She hasn't said it, but I know she blames me. At least a little.”
The fuck?
“She sends those articles as if she thinks they will spark a detail in my memory that I missed. She thinks it’s helpful.”
A bitter taste filled my mouth.
“Archibald,” I said, waiting until he shoved his glasses back on his face and his eyes were firmly on me. “That isn’t awareness, baby. It’s conditioning.”
A flicker of confusion crossed his expression.
“She’s not giving you information. She’s reinforcing a narrative. Same pattern, over and over, until your body stops treating it as external.”
His brows pulled together. “I—I don't think she does it to be cruel. She just doesn't understand how it affects me.”
“Have you told her?”
“How can I? I’m the reason her son is missing.”
I sucked in a breath. “Archibald Christopher Quinn.”
“How do you know my middle name?”
“Baby, I know your fucking blood type.”
A sound slipped out of him, dragged up from somewhere deeper than his voice. His throat worked around it in a sharp swallow. Chin lifting, his eyes found mine, brimming with awe and unshed tears.
“You—” his voice faltered, the edge of it softened by something close to disbelief. “You know all that…?”
I adjusted his glasses. “Hmmm.”
“If you know everything, why didn’t you know about Abel?”
My hand stilled for half a second before shifting, palming the back of his head.
“Because your pain isn’t mine to take,” I said quietly.
“Wh—what?”
“I can find records. Dates. Reports. Statements written by people who weren’t there and didn’t feel it.”
I scratched at his scalp.
“But that wouldn’t be him. And it wouldn’t be you. It would be a version of your life that someone else decided was clean enough to file away. I want to hear it the way it lives in you. Even the parts that don’t make sense. Especially those.”
Something in his expression broke open, and the thought that followed wasn’t heroic—it was quiet, ugly, and absolute: anything that hurt him would end in my hands.
“I’m not going to take your pain and turn it into something easier to look at,” I murmured. “I know what it feels like when someone does that.”
A slow breath moved through him, his weight settling more fully against me instead of holding itself back.
“I’ll learn you the right way,” I whispered. “From you.”
Not from files. Not from records. Not from anyone who thought they understood.