Sir Dog
Fuse
"You have to check under the bed first. That's the rule."
I check under the bed. Nothing but a sock and a stuffed rabbit missing one ear.
"Clear."
"Now the closet."
I check the closet too. Rose watches from her pillow fort, arms crossed, supervising with the same dead seriousness she brings to everything.
This is the third night running. Started as a one-time thing after the photo showed up at the shop, Nora too rattled to argue when Rose asked if I'd stay until the monsters left.
Now it's what happens. Dinner, bath, three books, monster check, and then me sitting on the floor by her door until her breathing evens out.
Nobody decided this on purpose. It became the shape of things.
I stuck my head in the bathroom earlier, halfway through bath time, towel over one shoulder, and just watched us a second—Rose narrating a very serious debate about which rubber duck outranked the others, me apparently expected to weigh in.
Nora didn't say anything. Just smiled the kind of smile that looked like it surprised her as I turned right back around went to the kitchen.
"Closet's clear too," I tell Rose. "We're good."
"You have to say the whole thing."
"What whole thing?"
"The monster thing. Mommy does it different but you have to do yours."
I don't actually have a monster thing. I made one up the first night because she looked at me like she expected it, and apparently whatever I said stuck hard enough to become law.
"No monsters allowed past the door," I say. "Not under the bed, not in the closet, not in the hallway. House rule."
"Says who?"
"Says me."
She considers this. Five years old and she negotiates like she's been doing it her whole life.
"Okay." Satisfied, she burrows down into the blankets. "Now you have to do the animals."
The animals are lined up against the headboard in an order I don't understand but apparently can't disrupt. A bear missing an eye. The one-eared rabbit, rescued from under the bed. A stuffed dog twice the size of either of them, clearly the senior member of the group.
"Bear's name is Bear," she informs me, like this is new information I desperately need. "Rabbit's name is Rabbit. Dog's name is Sir Dog."
"Sir Dog."
"He's very important."
"Clearly."
"You have to say goodnight to all of them or they get sad."
I say goodnight to Bear. I say goodnight to Rabbit. I say goodnight to Sir Dog, with the gravity the situation apparently demands, and Rose nods like I've passed some test I didn't know I was taking.
This is what I do now. Negotiate bedtime treaties with stuffed animals. Six months ago I was running watch rotations and cracking skulls when the job called for it, and now my whole evening revolves around whether Sir Dog has been properly acknowledged.
I don't mind it. That's the strange part. I don't mind any of it.
I’m starting to crave it.
She huffs out a sigh about as big as she is. "Story now."
"Which one?"
"The dragon one. You have to do the voices."
I don't remember agreeing to do voices, but apparently I committed to that somewhere around night one and there's no walking it back now. I make the dragon low and rumbling.
I make the princess nothing like a princess, more like Ash trying to sound polite, and Rose laughs so hard she has to sit up to catch her breath.
Halfway through the second page her eyelids start losing the fight.
I keep reading anyway, slower now, voice dropping the way it does when I can tell she's circling sleep instead of fighting it.
Somewhere around the part where the dragon realizes he's been guarding the wrong treasure all along, Rose's fingers drift across the comforter until they find my hand.
I glance down.
Her hand disappears inside mine, tiny fingers curling around two of mine before sleep steals the last of the fight out of her. She doesn't even open her eyes. Just holds on like she already knows I'll still be here when she wakes up.
Emotion shifts inside my chest. And this time, I don’t wish it away.
I close my hand around hers, careful not to wake her, and finish the story anyway.
When the dragon flies home, she's completely asleep, one hand tucked inside mine, the other still wrapped around Sir Dog's ear.
I sit there a minute longer than I need to. Looking at her.
My old man never read anyone a bedtime story in his life.
Wouldn't have known what to do with a kid like this if you'd handed him the script.
Everything he taught me about being a man involved fists first, words never, and somewhere along the way I decided that meant I wasn't built for anything gentler than that.
This kid disagreed with that decision before I ever got a say in it.
I ease off the bed slow, careful with every shift of weight, and the floor creaks once near the door. I freeze. She doesn't stir.
Nora's in the hallway when I step out, leaning against the wall in the dark, arms crossed, watching me the way she's watched the last two nights too.
"She asleep?"
"Out cold."
"You're good at this." Quiet, like she's still getting used to saying it out loud. "I didn't expect that."
"Neither did I."
We stand there a second, the hallway narrow enough that we're close without trying to be. She doesn't pull back this time. Doesn't put space between us out of old habit the way she used to.
"Thank you," she says. "For all of it. The monster checks. The voices. All of it."
"Don't have to thank me."
"I want to."
I press a kiss to her forehead instead of answering, because some things don't need words stacked on top of them, and she leans into it like she's been waiting all day for exactly this.
Later, alone in the dark of my own place, I lie awake longer than I should.
A man like Lucas, I know how to handle. Cut him down clean before he gets close enough to matter. Simple math, simple plan, the kind of problem my hands were built to solve.
This is different math. There's no clean cut for a kid who renames her stuffed animals just to make me say goodnight to each one, no simple plan for a woman finally letting herself lean instead of standing alone.
This isn't a problem I solve once and walk away from. It's one I show up for again tomorrow, and the day after, whether I've got the first idea what I'm doing or not.
Turns out that's the whole job. Showing up again.
I make myself a promise anyway, lying there in the dark, absolute and nonnegotiable.
Whatever Lucas brings, whatever it costs, this ends with both of them safe. Every other outcome is off the table. There's no version of this where I let either of them pay for what I am or what I came from.
I'll figure out the rest as I go.
I always do.