Chapter 18 - Rick
Rick had not meant to drink.
He told himself the first measure of whiskey would blunt the rough edges of his temper, the second would smooth the scrape of memory, and the third…
well, the third he poured because he could still see Rosalia’s eyes when she swore she would never hurt him.
His office felt too small for his anger and too empty for his regret.
A portrait of some dead ancestor watched from the wall as if he’d sat in this very chair and made the same mistake a lifetime ago.
The bottle sat heavy on the desk. So did the crumpled scrap he’d fished from the wastebin on his way in, the torn corner of Rosalia’s stationery.
His name, and beneath it, the words blurred but still legible: he’s so clever.
He should have burned it. Instead, he kept it.
He hadn’t needed the reminder, but he kept it anyway, proof for the part of him that still wanted to believe her.
She had been gone when he finally returned to the hotel. No note. No explanation. Just a cab booked for Green Mountain territory.
So he had returned home with his daughter to Silvermist.
He pressed his forearms to the desk and breathed through his nose until the wolf quieted.
The room held the muted scents of beeswax and paper and something floral that clung to the curtains.
Some ghost of her perfume. He had chosen distance because distance was safe; distance meant he couldn’t be flanked.
And yet there he was, alone with a bottle, already regretting that distance like a fool.
A whisper of sound at the door cut through the static.
Tiny knuckles, three soft taps, then silence.
Rick set the glass down, “Come.”
The door edged open. Eva’s face appeared, pale and owlish in the lamplight, curls a halo of shadow. She did not cross the threshold at first; she stood with one hand on the doorknob, the other bunching the hem of her nightdress, as if ready to bolt.
“Papa?”
His chair scraped as he stood. Whatever the whiskey had loosened in him slid aside. “Sweetheart,” his voice came out softer than he felt, “you should be sleeping.”
“I tried.” She slipped inside and shut the door carefully behind her, as if afraid of being loud. “I…I missed Rosalia.”
He swallowed. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Eva’s small mouth turned down. “You smell…wrong.” She squinted at him, earnest and unblinking. “Like when you’re trying not to be mad.”
It would have been so easy, once, to turn away.
To tell her to go back to bed, to harden his face until she bounced off it like a wave off rock.
Before Rosalia, he would have done it. Before the last weeks had worn grooves through him and shown him what it meant for a child to trust him with her fear at midnight.
“Come here,” he said instead, holding out a hand.
Eva crossed the room in a hurry, the too-long nightdress tangling around her ankles. She smelled like soap and warm linen and faintly of sleep. He lifted her with one arm and found the button at the back of the desk lamp with the other, turning the light down until the office softened to amber.
Eva’s fingers found the lapel of his jacket and held on. “Where is she?”
The truth lodged behind his teeth. He had left Rosalia with anger still hot enough to melt bone; she had left the suite long after, quiet as snowfall.
He had not gone to look. Pride, temper, habit, call it what it was.
And now his daughter stood in a doorway in a too-big nightdress, asking where the only other safe thing in her world had gone.
“She decided to go home,” he said carefully, “her real home.”
“Her real home?” Eva asked, her eyebrows drawing together. “I thought…I thought this was her real home.”
“She made her choice,” Rick said, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice, “we must respect it.”
“But I miss her.”
He tightened his arm around her. He wanted to rage. To shout and snarl his anger, his pain, his betrayal. But his daughter was already sad, already scared.
He would not scare her further.
“I’m sorry that you miss her,” he said, his voice strangled. “I…I miss her, too.”
It was the truth. He could not lie, not to his daughter. He missed Rosalia. He missed the female he had thought she was. The female she had pretended to be.
He was a fool for ever having trusted her.
Eva relaxed by degrees, like a small animal settling in a nest. He felt the moment her muscles let go.
“Did you and Rosalia have a fight?” she asked into his shirt.
He could lie. He could varnish the truth and call it diplomacy. He could push her away with half-answers and tell himself he was protecting her from the weight of adult things.
He did none of those.
“We had a…hard talk,” he said. “I spoke when I should have been quiet.”
Eva tipped her head back so she could see his face. There was something deeply unflattering about the way children looked at you, as if their eyes were a mirror polished sharper than steel. “Did you use your big voice?”
“A little.”
She considered this gravely. “Maybe next time, use your small voice first.”
An unexpected laugh pulled at him, brief and low. “That seems wise.”
She blinked up at him. “I like when you’re wise.”
“You and me both.”
Silence pooled for a beat, heavy but not uncomfortable.
He shifted, reaching for the throw folded along the back of the settee.
He shook it out one-handed and draped it over her legs.
She settled against his chest, and he relished the comforting warmth of his pup against him.
At least she was here, safe in his arms.
“Will you tell me a story?” Eva asked.
“What kind of story?”
“The moon one,” she said, “about the wolf who falls in love with the moon.”
He didn’t remember ever telling it like that, but perhaps Rosalia had, at the piano or in the library or curled into a corner of the sofa while he paced the hall.
The Wolf and The Moon, Eva had called it once, her favorite.
He cleared his throat and found the cadence he used only for her, the one that smoothed the rasp from his voice.
“Once,” he began softly, “there was a wolf who believed he knew the whole forest because he could see it all. He ran the ridges and counted the paths and kept the border so clean that even the rabbits knew where to stop. He ruled the trees, taking what he wanted, thinking that because he was the biggest and the best, everything would be alright. All that mattered was how impressive his forest was. One night, the moon slipped behind a bank of clouds. The wolf was angry because he used her light to look after his kingdom. He howled for her to come back, and when she didn’t, he decided he couldn’t trust what he couldn’t see. ”
Eva made a small, sympathetic sound.
“So he ran,” Rick continued, “nose to the ground, eyes narrowed, teeth bared, for the border, for the places where trouble grows. But the trees are darker when you look at them that way. And the ground is meaner. And the wolf’s paws began to hurt, and still the moon did not come back.
Then he heard something that wasn’t a sound. ”
“What?” Eva whispered.
“Breathing,” he said. “Not his own. Something small and brave, asleep in a den the wolf had forgotten to check. A rabbit. He stopped. There were other creatures there, bad ones. Ones who wanted to hunt the rabbit down. To eat her all up for dinner. And then he realized. The moon wasn’t hiding from him; she was hiding the small rabbit from sight. ”
Eva gasped, even though she had heard this story a hundred times before.
“And then, the wolf realized that all this time he had gotten it wrong. It didn’t matter how impressive his forest was.
How much everyone admired him. He had been given his strength to protect those who lived in the forest. And so, he drove away the nasty beasts, so that the little rabbit was safe.
Only then did the moon come out again, shining brighter than ever before. ”
Eva made a pleased hum. “She was just testing him.”
“She was. She had fallen in love with the wolf that protected the forest. When she came to him that night, he apologized for not trusting her. For forgetting what really mattered.”
He felt her lashes lower against his shirt. “The wolf is you,” she said matter-of-factly, already half asleep. “And the small brave rabbit is me.”
He tipped his chin until his mouth brushed her hair, “Correct on both counts.”
“And Rosalia is the moon.”
He closed his eyes. The child had a gift for cutting to the bone. “Maybe,” he allowed.
“She’ll come back,” Eva murmured.
He tucked the blanket more closely around her, “Maybe,” he repeated, softer this time.
A few breaths later, she was heavy in his arms in the way children get when sleep drops them like a stone.
He sat with her a while for the sake of sitting, because there were only a few places in the world where his heart remembered how to be still, and most of them involved this child asleep against him.
When her breathing had deepened enough that he could move without waking her, he stood carefully, lifting her as if she were made of spun sugar.
She looped her arms around his neck by instinct.
He carried her to the bedroom and laid her on the turned-down bed, smoothing the sheet up to her collarbone the way she liked, tucking it beneath her shoulders with a small, precise push.
She stirred. “You said you’d be here.”
“I am.” He brushed a knuckle over her cheek. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Even if the moon hides,” she mumbled.
“Even then.”
He stood there longer than necessary because he could. Then he crossed the rug to the small table, poured a glass of water, and drank it while watching the steady rise and fall of her chest. The water sobered nothing and everything at once.