Chapter Seventeen #3
"It's not that simple," I said, but my voice had lost its conviction. The certainty I'd been wearing like armor was developing hairline fractures, and through them I could feel something warm pressing in, something that felt dangerously like the truth.
"It is, though." Abby pulled Gerald closer against her chest and rested her chin on his purple head, and her green eyes were luminous and steady and utterly without guile.
"I know because I used to think the same thing.
Before Gideon. I was in the system—the foster system—and I thought needing someone was the worst thing you could do.
Because every time I needed someone, they left.
Or they hurt me. Or they were never really there at all, and the needing was just me talking to an empty room. "
Emily's hand moved to Abby's knee. A quiet, grounding touch. Abby covered it with her own, Gerald shifting to accommodate the rearrangement, and the gesture was so natural, so practiced, that it was clear this was something they'd done before—this holding of each other during the hard parts. And I remembered my life in the foster system with such clarity at that moment it hurt. I’d never been abused. I’d never been mistreated. But I’d never been loved either.
"Gideon didn't fix me," Abby continued. "I want to say that first because people always think that's the story—broken girl, strong man, fixed.
But that's not what happened. What happened is Daddy saw me.
Not the version of me that tried to be normal.
Not the version that learned how to mask and how to sit still and how to not say the thing I was thinking even though I'd already said it in my head and couldn't always tell if it had come out my mouth yet.
" She paused, blinked, and then added, "Which is why I sometimes confuse people.
Because the conversation I'm having in my head and the conversation I'm having out loud aren't always the same thing. But Gideon learned that. He learned my language.”
She looked at me. Not through me, not past me, not at the surface of me.
At me. The way Xavier looked at me. The way that made me feel like every layer I'd built.
Every careful, protective shell of I'm fine and I'm managing and I'm building independence was transparent, and what lived underneath was visible to anyone brave enough to look.
"Needing Gideon doesn't make me weak," Abby said.
"It makes me Abby. It's how I'm built. My brain works differently, and part of how it works is that it works better with him.
Not because I can't function—I can function.
I functioned for twenty-two years before I met him.
I survived the system and I survived things that—" A shadow crossed her face, brief and quickly replaced by something fiercer.
"I survived. I can survive. Surviving was never the question.
The question is whether surviving is enough.
And it's not, Molly. It's not enough. Surviving is just..
. existing with your teeth clenched. And you—" She pointed at me with the hand that wasn't holding Gerald, her index finger steady, her gaze unwavering.
"You are sitting on the floor of an apartment that makes you sad, surviving, and you're calling it independence.
And I don't understand why you would choose that when the person who makes your brain quiet and your body safe and your heart—" She pressed Gerald against her chest. "Your heart full.
When that person is sitting in a truck outside your building because he can't be farther away than that and still breathe. "
"But I—" My voice cracked. "I was in the system too. I was passed around and nobody chose me and nobody stayed, and I learned that the only person you can count on is yourself, and if I go back to him now, if I go back before I've proven I can—"
"Proven to who?" Abby asked.
The question stopped me cold.
"To... myself. To Xavier. To—"
"Xavier didn't ask you to prove anything at the end.
" Abby's brow furrowed with the intensity of someone working through a logic problem that didn't add up.
"Xavier asked you to choose him. And then you said he was wrong about asking, and he agreed.
And then you decided to prove something nobody was asking for anymore, and now you're both miserable, and Gerald thinks—" She glanced down at the elephant, then back at me.
"Gerald thinks you're making this too complicated. "
My throat was closing. The croissant sat untouched on my knee, and my hands had stopped trembling.
Not because the tremor had resolved but because my whole body had gone very, very still, the way it went still when something true was approaching and every part of me needed to be quiet enough to hear it.
I stood up and caught the pastry before it hit the floor. The sudden urgency. The need. The self-hatred for pushing the person that loved me the most away. “I need to call him.”
Emily looked at Abby then back at me. “You can’t right now. They’re on a mission. They’ve gone to do a rescue.”
How I didn’t immediately throw up I would never know. Because finally I knew I wasn’t meant to live without him, and there was a real chance he wouldn’t stay alive long enough for me to tell him.