Chapter Nine
Molly
The question hit me hard. Not because it was complicated—it wasn't—but because of what it implied.
When's the last time you did something just because it felt good?
When's the last time you let yourself play?
When's the last time you were small and safe and the only thing expected of you was staying inside the lines?
"I don't—" I started, and my voice sounded strange. Thin and uncertain, like a child being offered a toy she wasn't sure she was allowed to touch. "I haven't. Not since—I mean, I used to color with Sasha and Luka. Maria's kids. But that was for them, not for—"
"Not for you," Clare said softly. "That's what I thought."
She reached across the coffee table and picked up the woodland animals book—the one with the fox on the cover, curled in a bed of autumn leaves, its eyes half-closed in an expression of perfect, uncomplicated peace.
She opened it to a page near the middle.
A rabbit sitting in a garden, surrounded by flowers and butterflies and the kind of serenity that only existed in coloring books and the imaginations of people who hadn't seen what the world could do.
"Here," she said, and placed it in front of me like an offering. Like a door being held open. "You don't have to be good at it. You don't have to stay in the lines. You just have to let yourself do it."
I stared at the rabbit. Its outline was clean and simple, the kind of illustration designed for hands that might not be steady, for people who needed the act of creation to be gentle and forgiving.
"I don't know if I can," I whispered, and I wasn't talking about coloring.
I was talking about all of it. The ribbons and the juice boxes and the capital-D Daddy on a note beside my coffee.
The world that Clare and Emily inhabited so naturally, the world I'd pressed my face against the glass of for years, wanting so badly that the wanting had become a physical ache I'd learned to live around like a bone that had healed crooked.
"You can," Emily said, and her voice had lost its bubbly energy.
What was underneath was something quieter and fiercer.
The voice of a woman who'd stood exactly where I was standing and had been terrified of the same things and had stepped forward anyway.
"You think you can't because you think being Little is something you have to earn.
Something you have to deserve. Something that requires you to be whole and healed and functioning before you're allowed to access it.
" She picked up a gel pen—purple, glittery—and uncapped it with her teeth.
"But that's backwards. Being Little isn't the reward for getting better. It's part of how you get better."
She said it so simply. Like it was obvious.
Like the sky was blue and water was wet and the soft, small part of me that I'd been protecting behind walls of competence and independence and “I'm fine, I don't need anyone,” wasn't something to be ashamed of but something to be nurtured.
Fed. Given coloring books and stickers and a safe place to exist.
I picked up the green pencil.
My hand shook. The tip wavered over the page like a seismograph recording an earthquake only I could feel, and for a moment, I just hovered there, pencil in the air, rabbit waiting, the distance between the two feeling insurmountable.
Then Clare's hand covered mine. Not guiding.
Not steadying. Just there—warm and present and anchoring me to the moment the way Xavier's hand on the back of my head anchored me to sleep.
She didn't say anything. She just held my hand until the tremor settled into something manageable, and then she let go, and I touched the pencil to the paper.
The first stroke was terrible. Wobbly and uncertain, veering outside the line almost immediately, the green trailing off into white space like a sentence that lost its nerve halfway through.
I stared at it and felt my cheeks flush with a shame that was wildly disproportionate to the situation.
It was a coloring book, not a doctoral thesis, and the rabbit didn't care if its garden was crooked.
"Perfect," Clare said, and she meant it. I could hear that she meant it the way I could hear Xavier's sincerity when he said good girl. Not as a performance, not as encouragement designed to manage my fragility, but as a genuine response to something she found worthy of praise.
"It's outside the line," I said.
"So?" Emily was already bent over the princess book, her purple gel pen moving with the confident, looping strokes of someone who'd long since stopped caring about lines.
"Lines are suggestions. Dion tried to tell me once that coloring was about precision and focus, and Maddox threw a crayon at his head. "
I laughed. It was small and surprised, like something my body had forgotten it could do and was cautiously, wonderingly remembering.
I colored the rabbit's garden. Slowly, stroke by trembling stroke, the green pencil filling in leaves and stems, while Clare worked on the mandala book beside me with a quiet focus that felt like meditation, and Emily provided a running commentary on her princess's wardrobe choices that were so absurd and so specific that I kept having to stop coloring because my shoulders were shaking with laughter.
"She's clearly a winter," Emily said, holding up her page to show a princess whose dress she'd colored in a riot of clashing neons. "But the kingdom's fashion advisor is stuck in a summer palette mindset, and honestly? That's the real villain of this story."
"The dragon on the next page might disagree," Clare murmured, not looking up from her mandala.
"The dragon is an ally. The dragon understands accessorizing."
I reached for a different pencil—yellow, the color of the butterflies that hovered above my rabbit's garden—and something happened as my fingers closed around it.
Something so small and so seismic that I almost missed it.
The trembling in my hand eased. Doc said it might persist for weeks, but it eased, the way a clenched muscle eased when warmth was applied.
Like the act of choosing a color, of filling in a wing, of creating something soft and small and purposeless, was its own kind of medicine, working on a system that pharmaceuticals couldn't reach.
My eyes burned. I blinked hard and focused on the butterfly's wing, on the way the yellow pencil moved across the page in strokes that were still unsteady but were my choice, my hand, my color, my creation.
After eight weeks of having every choice stripped away, of being a vessel for someone else's agenda, the simple act of deciding that this butterfly would be yellow instead of blue or pink or left empty was so profoundly, ridiculously empowering that the tears spilled over before I could stop them, landing on the page and warping the paper into tiny, translucent blooms.
"Oh no," I said, swiping at my eyes. "I'm crying on the rabbit."
"The rabbit doesn't mind," Clare said, and when I looked up, her eyes were bright too. Not with pity but with understanding, the deep and specific understanding of someone who'd cried on her own coloring pages and knew exactly what those tears meant. "He's a garden rabbit. He's used to rain."
That made me laugh and cry at the same time, which made Emily laugh, which made Clare's composure finally crack, and for a few minutes, the three of us sat on Xavier's couch making sounds that were impossible to classify—half grief, half joy, half something that didn't have a name in any language I knew but that lived in the space between broken and healing, the space where you were both at once, and that was allowed.
We colored for over an hour. Somewhere in the middle of it, the princess book got abandoned in favor of the stickers.
Emily discovered the cat expression sheet and became so invested in selecting the appropriate feline emotion for each page of my coloring book that it became its own activity.
A grumpy orange tabby went next to the rabbit.
A wide-eyed calico perched on a flower stem.
A smug Siamese surveyed the garden from the corner of the page with an expression that Emily insisted captured the exact energy of Dion in a briefing.
"He does that thing," she said, pressing the sticker down with her thumb, "where he looks at you like he already knows what you're going to say and is mildly disappointed that you're going to say it anyway."
"That's terrifyingly accurate," Clare said, studying the Siamese. "Has anyone told him he's a cat?"
"Multiple times. He remains unimpressed."
Clare had moved on from her mandala to teaching me a game she called Color Story, where you picked three colors without looking and then had to create a picture using only those three.
My blind draw produced magenta, brown, and a shade of teal that had no business existing outside of a 1980's truck, but Clare insisted it was "mermaid adjacent" and therefore perfect for underwater scenes.
"Your rabbit is now an underwater rabbit," she announced, sliding the paper toward me. "He lives in a coral garden. The butterflies are actually very confused fish."
"I feel like the rabbit should have been consulted about this life change," I said, but I was already reaching for the teal, already imagining the garden transformed—leaves becoming seaweed, flowers becoming anemones, the grumpy orange tabby sticker now inexplicably submerged and looking even more displeased about it.
The absurdity of the whole thing was its own kind of therapy, a permission slip to be ridiculous, to be small, to care deeply about the backstory of a cartoon rabbit who'd been involuntarily relocated to an ocean he hadn't signed up for.