14. Sabrina
— ? —
Sabrina
I woke to sunlight that felt too bright and too honest, the kind that doesn’t let you pretend the night before didn’t happen.
In the kitchen, Ivy’s laughter came high and delighted, completely at odds with the complicated tangle of emotions sitting heavy in my chest. For a moment I just lay there, staring at the ceiling, trying to sort through everything that had happened the night before.
I made myself walk back through it: the storm, Killian showing up soaked and worried, the cut on his arm and the blood on my floor. The bathroom.
God, the bathroom.
I pressed my hands over my face and groaned quietly.
What had I been thinking? I hadn’t been thinking, that was the problem.
I’d let the proximity and the danger and the raw need of the moment override every rational thought in my head, and now I had to go out there and face him in the harsh light of day.
More laughter from the kitchen. The clatter of dishes. Killian’s voice, low and warm, saying something I couldn’t make out.
I got up, pulled on a sweatshirt over my pajamas, and steeled myself for whatever was waiting on the other side of the bedroom door.
The scene in the kitchen stopped me in my tracks.
Killian was standing over the waffle iron in yesterday’s clothes, which were wrinkled and still slightly damp.
He had a spatula in one hand and a look of intense concentration on his face, the same look he got when he was working through a particularly complex equation.
Ivy was perched on a stool at the counter, watching him with rapt attention.
“Okay,” he was saying. “This one is going to be a masterpiece. I can feel it.”
He lifted the lid of the waffle iron with a dramatic flourish. Batter had oozed out the sides and down onto the counter.
“Daddy, I don’t think it’s supposed to do that.”
“It’s supposed to do exactly that. This is advanced waffle engineering. You wouldn’t understand.”
“It looks like a blob.”
“It’s not a blob. It’s a robot. See, there’s the head, and there’s the body, and there’s…” He squinted at the waffle iron. “Okay, those are supposed to be arms, but I might have miscalculated the batter viscosity.”
Ivy leaned in to examine his creation. “It looks like a monster.”
“Monsters can be robots.”
“Monster robots!”
“Exactly. Monster robot waffles. A Kerrington family delicacy.”
He pried the waffle onto a plate and presented it to Ivy with a bow. The thing was truly horrifying, a misshapen lump with what appeared to be asymmetrical protrusions and a leering grin where the batter had puddled.
Ivy grabbed her fork with enthusiasm. “I love it.”
“See? Your mother would tell you it looks like a crime scene, but you have vision.”
“What’s a crime scene?”
“Ask her when you’re older.”
I stood in the doorway, caught between the urge to laugh and the urge to scream. This was what he did. This was his superpower. He showed up and charmed everyone and made himself indispensable, and then you forgot all the reasons you were supposed to be keeping him at arm’s length.
It didn’t help that he’d slept in his clothes and looked it, shirt rumpled and half-untucked, the top button gone, a shadow of stubble along his jaw that I had, in a weaker era, referred to out loud as a problem.
My brain helpfully replayed the toilet, the sink, the good girl, and I had to physically turn toward the coffee maker before my face gave me away entirely.
Cool. Normal. Completely unbothered. That was the energy I was going for and spectacularly failing to achieve.
Killian looked up and saw me watching. His expression shifted, uncertainty flickering beneath the forced cheerfulness.
“Good morning. There’s coffee, and I made waffles, although I’m using the term loosely.”
“I can see that.”
Ivy waved her fork at me, a chunk of monster waffle impaled on the tines. “Mommy, look! Daddy made me a robot!”
“It’s very… creative.”
“Do you want one? Daddy said he’d make you any shape you want, but he can’t promise it’ll look right.”
“I appreciate the honesty.”
I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down at the tiny table. Killian put a plate in front of me without asking, another horrifying creation that might have been attempting to be a heart shape or might have been a failed chemistry experiment. It was impossible to tell.
“You didn’t have to do this,” I said quietly.
“I wanted to. You were asleep, and Ivy was hungry, and I figured the least I could do was attempt breakfast after…” He trailed off, glancing at Ivy. “After the storm and everything.”
The storm and everything. That was one way to put it.
Ivy was absorbed in her waffle, making robot noises as she pretended to march it across her plate before taking another bite. The normalcy of it was almost painful, this glimpse of what our mornings could have been if things had gone differently.
“What time did you get up?” I asked.
“Around six. The couch was comfortable, actually. Better than the floor of Ivy’s room at the house, anyway.”
“You slept on the floor of her room?”
“Couple of times. The bed is too big without you in it. Her room smells like her, and that made it easier to pretend things were okay.”
I took a sip of coffee instead of answering, letting the bitter heat anchor me.
Ivy finished her waffle and looked up with a thoughtful expression. “Daddy, did you sleep in my room here last night?”
Killian’s hand paused on his coffee mug. “No, ladybug. I slept on the couch. Why?”
“Because I heard Mommy calling your name.”
The coffee turned to ash in my mouth. I felt my face go hot, the blush starting somewhere around my collarbones and rushing upward until my cheeks were burning.
Killian went very still.
“Calling my name?” he said carefully.
“Yeah. In the middle of the night. She was saying ‘Killian, Killian,’ over and over. I thought maybe you were in her room and she needed something.”
Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God.
I set my mug down too hard, coffee sloshing over the rim. “You must have been dreaming, sweetheart. I don’t talk in my sleep.”
Ivy frowned. “Yes you do. You always talk in your sleep. Remember when we had the sleepover and you said all that stuff about spaghetti?”
“That was different.”
“How was it different?”
“I don’t remember saying anything about spaghetti.”
“You said you wanted more parmesan. You said it really loud.”
Killian was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read. Amusement, maybe, or heat.
“I’m sure whatever I was saying last night was just a dream thing,” I said firmly. “Sometimes people say names in their sleep. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“But you sounded really happy. You said his name and then you made a humming sound.”
I was going to die. I was going to die right here at this kitchen table while my daughter innocently exposed my nocturnal activities and my husband tried not to laugh.
“Okay.” I pushed back from the table and stood up. “Breakfast is over. Killian, thank you for the waffles. You should probably head out now.”
“Already?”
“Yes. Already. You went out in that storm and you bled on my floor and I appreciate it, but you should go.”
Whatever he saw in my face, he decided not to fight it. He nodded and bent down to hug Ivy.
“Be good for your mom, ladybug. I’ll see you soon.”
“Okay, Daddy. Will you make me more monster waffles next time?”
“I’ll make you an entire monster army.”
I walked him to the door, keeping my distance, not trusting myself to get too close. Last night had been a lapse in judgment, a moment of weakness that couldn’t happen again. I needed to remember that.
“About what Ivy said,” he started.
“We’re not talking about that.”
“Sabrina.”
“I said we’re not talking about it. Go home, Killian.”
He looked at me with those dark eyes that saw too much, that always saw too much. Then he nodded and stepped out onto the porch.
“I’ll send you something later. A voice note. Just… listen to it, okay? When you have a moment.”
“Fine.”
I closed the door before he could say anything else.
***
Sully turned up an hour later with the drone in a cardboard box and the air of a man delivering a body.
“He asked me to bring this,” he said. “He fixed it. He wanted you to see that he fixed it. He didn’t say that part out loud but it was extremely present in the room.”
“Why didn’t he bring it himself?”
“Because you threw him out this morning and he’s decided to respect that, which for him is roughly the equivalent of a religious conversion.” Sully set the box on the counter and looked around the cabin. “God. This is worse than the photos.”
“There are photos?”
“There is a group chat. You don’t want in.”
He took the coffee I hadn’t offered him and sat down at the tiny table, and his knees didn’t fit under it, and he made a whole production of that instead of saying whatever he’d actually come to say.
“Spit it out, Sully.”
“Spit what out.”
“You drove all the way to ’Sconset to hand-deliver a robot. Spit it out.”
He turned the mug around on the table.
“I was there,” he said. “In the garden. That’s the thing I keep going back to. I was sitting right there and I let him say it.”
“You didn’t make him say it.”
“No, but I know my brother, and I know the shape of him when he’s about to get a sentence wrong, and I watched it coming down the track and I did nothing.
” He rubbed his jaw. “He’d been circling it for twenty minutes.
He does this thing where he has to say the worst version of the idea out loud first so he can hear how wrong it is and then work backward to the true one.
He’s done it since he was nine. And I let him do it in a garden with an open gate. ”
I sat down opposite him, because my legs decided it for me.
“What was the true one?”
“That’s not mine to hand over.”
“Sully.”