Random Fanfictions of a Thirty Something

Marvel:

Remy Lebeau x Reader: Ultimate masterlist.

Bucky Barnes-

Lust for life:

Summary: After multiple failed attempts at retirement, you keep getting pulled back into action by Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes. Despite the constant bickering and teasing, there’s an undeniable tension between you and Bucky—something everyone else sees except the two of you.

When a new threat involving stolen Inhuman tech emerges, you reluctantly join Bucky and Sam for one more mission. As the stakes rise, your playful banter with Bucky deepens into something more, and the emotional walls you’ve both built finally begin to crumble.

Warnings: Swearing, Violence, Smut.

DC:

Rick Flag Senior: Bang Bang, Kiss Kiss.

Summary: For five grueling years, Taskforce X was both your lifeline and your torment. Mission after mission, you faced impossible odds with the dangling promise of a reduced sentence. Now, at last, you’re free—no more Belle Reve, no more danger. You’ve put that chapter behind you, determined to leave it locked away in the recesses of your mind.

But Amanda Waller has other plans. When she appears back in your life, she brings a new mission—and a new team. This time, you’re working alongside Rick Flag Sr., the father of your former team leader, and the members of Taskforce M. As the stakes rise, so do unexpected emotions. Tensions give way to an undeniable connection between you and Rick, a bond that deepens with every mission and threatens to pull you back into a world you thought you’d left behind forever. Warning: Slow-Burn, Age Gap, Violence, Swearing, Smut.

Rick Flag Junior: Is It Over Now? Summary: He wasn’t sure exactly when or how it happened—how he ended up standing in his bathroom at 2 a.m., wedged between your legs as you perched on his sink, wiping blood from your face and cleaning whatever wounds you came to him with. He always swore it was the last time, that he couldn't keep doing this; not with someone like you. Yet every night before bed he still walked over and unlocked that damn window on his fire escape. Every night he climbed into bed and waited until he heard your boots hit his floor. Every damn night he waited for you, waited until he could finally breathe again. Warnings; Slow-burn, Violence, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Smut. Bulletproof

Summary: You bend the rules when they’re wrong. He lives by the book—until he doesn’t.

Thrown together on probation, you go from spilled coffee and reluctant partnership to stakeouts, rain-soaked arguments, and late-night rescues. Somewhere between fake domestic covers, tuxedo galas, and napkin-drafted rules, duty turns into something messier—and much harder to walk away from.

Warnings: Slow Burn, Enemies to Partners to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Smut (Eventually), Fluff.

Pairings: Alternate Universe! Colonel Rick Flag Jr/Reader.

Adrian Chase: Wonderstruck

Summary: Falling in love with your best friend wasn’t supposed to happen—but with Adrian Chase, it was inevitable. Maybe it started back in high school, when he smiled at you across the science lab. Or maybe it crept in later, during those long, adrenaline-soaked nights working (sort of, not really) for ARGUS, where the line between best friends and something more blurred every time he looked at you like you were the only steady thing in his world.

Loving him was easy. Living with the fact that he might never love you back? That was the hard part.

Because whether he couldn’t feel it—or just wouldn’t let himself—you were stuck in a limbo of almosts. Lingering touches, late-night confessions, unspoken things that hung heavy in the air.

And eventually, something was going to give. Warnings: Slow-Burn, Angst, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Smut.

Misc:

Bittersweet Symphony ( Rafael Barba x Reader, Sonny Carisi x Reader) Summary: When you unexpectedly discover you're pregnant, you're thrust into navigating the complexities of your new reality. As the baby's father remains distant, it's your partner, Sonny Carisi, who steps up in ways you couldn't dream of. You find yourself grappling with a whirlwind of emotions, including the unexpected feelings of slowly falling in love with your partner.

Jimmy Logan x Reader: (Logan Lucky). Summary: After a decade away, you return to Boone County, stirring up old tensions and unresolved feelings with Jimmy Logan, the man who never truly let you go. As Clyde watches the two of you navigate the weight of your shared past, it becomes clear that your return isn’t just a visit—it’s a collision with emotions neither of you can ignore.

Pairings: Jimmy Logan/Reader Warnings: Angst, Smut, Slow-Burn, Swearing New Romantics (Stephen Holder x Reader. The Killing)

Summary: You and Stephen had an agreement—no strings, just sex after a long day. You set rules to keep things simple, laughing as you both fleshed out the details over cheap takeout and a notepad. At first it was a joke made by two colleagues who didn't have time for a relationship; but one by one, you find yourselves breaking every single rule. Sleepovers, secrets, meeting family, getting jealous—it all slowly crept in until there was only one rule left. And then suddenly, neither one of you were laughing anymore.

Warnings: 18+, Smut, Swearing, mentions of past drug use. Pairings: Stephen Holder/Reader. The Only Exception (Shane Maguire x Reader. Untamed)

Enemies to Lovers. Summary: When you- a stubborn, sharp-tongued chef from San Francisco takes a job at a remote luxury lodge in Yosemite as a favour from your old boss, you immediately find yourself butting heads with the park’s brooding Wildlife Management Officer, Shane Maguire—a man who’s as uncompromising and wild as the land he protects. Protective of his solitude, Shane has zero patience for people from the city who wander off trail and break his every rule. Your first encounters are a battle of wits and wills, all biting sarcasm, heated arguments, and barbed nicknames—especially when he calls you “princess” just to watch you get more irritated.

But when the dangers of the wilderness close in, you two are forced together again and again. The line between rivalry and attraction blurs as every fight leaves you more breathless, every secret shared chips away at your defenses, and every accidental touch lingers too long. You falls first, despite all your efforts to resist him—but when Shane’s walls finally crack, he falls so hard there’s no coming back from it. Pairings: Shane Maguire/Reader. Warnings: Slow-Burn, Fluff, Violence, Swearing, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Smut, Enemies to Lovers.

Pieces of Me Masterlist (Benjamin Poindexter x Reader. Daredevil)

Summary: You never believed in soulmates—until you came home to find Benjamin “Dex” Poindexter, bleeding and wanted, in your kitchen.

The pull in your chest you’d ignored your whole life snapped into focus; the fugitive with perfect aim was yours. Between sarcasm, stitched wounds, and midnight stakeouts, the two of you try to build something fragile and real.

He was precision; you were chaos. Together, you found strange sort of balance

Pairings: Benjamin 'Dex' Poindexter/Reader. Warnings: Slow-Burn, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Swearing, Romance, Fluff, Smut, humor, smut.

Untouchable Masterlist (Jackson 'Jax' Teller x Reader. Sons of Anarchy)

Summary:

You moved to Charming looking for quiet — a rented house that looked nothing like your old one, a remote accounting job that you argued with your boss for, and no more of the club politics you grew up with. After cutting ties with your father, the president of a Nevada MC, you swore off anything with a kutte. But peace lasts exactly until you shoulder-check a man in the supermarket aisle.

From that collision on, the town stops being quiet. Jackson Teller keeps showing up — first to jump your dead car battery, then to ask for help with his ledger at TM. The banter turns familiar; the air between you gets heavier. But your last name is the kind that could burn down alliances, and the truth about who your father is sits like a loaded gun between you.

Chapter 6: Paperwork as a Weapon. “Throw it down (The caution blocks you from the wind), Hold it up (To the rays) You wait and see when the smoke clears…” You Learn-Alanis Moresette.

Andrew Cody had held a lot of weapons in his life.

Guns, mostly.

Pistols small enough to disappear beneath a shirt. Revolvers that sat heavy in his palm and kicked up through his wrist when he fired them. Shotguns that bruised his shoulder even when he held them correctly. Rifles with cold metal pressed against his cheek while he watched a target through the sights and waited for someone else to give the signal.

He knew how every one of them felt.

He knew the difference between a gun that had been cleaned recently and one that hadn’t. He knew the smell of oil, metal and powder. He knew how ammunition clicked into place and how the weight changed when the magazine was full. He knew how a weapon could make a frightened man brave and a stupid man dangerous.

Knives were different.

Quieter.

More personal.

You had to get close enough to smell someone’s breath when you used a knife. Close enough to feel their body move. Close enough that there was no pretending you hadn’t meant it.

He’d held hunting knives, kitchen knives, switchblades and box cutters. Anything with an edge could become something else when it was put in the right hand—or the wrong one.

Pope had used things that had never been designed to hurt anyone.

A sledgehammer, a crowbar, a tyre iron. A length of electrical cable wrapped around his fist because it was what he had within reach. Chains. Rope. Broken glass. Heavy flashlights. Pieces of wood torn from whatever was close enough to grab. A brick once, rough against his palm, the corners biting into his skin as he lifted it.

He’d used doors as weapons, slamming them into bodies. Walls, too, if someone stood close enough to one. Floors. Countertops. Car bonnets. His own weight.

His hands.

His hands were the weapon he trusted most. They couldn’t be knocked away and forgotten in the grass. They didn’t jam. They didn’t need loading. They were always there at the ends of his arms, scarred across the knuckles and strong enough to turn fear into something physical.

Weapons made sense to Pope.

You held them.

You aimed them.

You used them.

Afterward, there was blood or damage or silence. Something you could see. Something you could understand. He had never realised how easily a few sheets of white paper could become a weapon.

Not until that Saturday afternoon.

Henry was sitting on the rug in the middle of your living room when Pope walked in, his legs folded underneath him and an alphabet puzzle spread across the floor. The wooden pieces were painted in bright colours, some of them chipped along the edges from being dropped or chewed or forced into the wrong places.

Henry held the letter R in one hand, turning it over and over while he stared at the empty spaces in the board.

“R,” he murmured through the lego tyre between his teeth.

“R,” you answered automatically from somewhere near the kitchen counter.

Your voice sounded wrong.

Not obviously wrong. You weren’t crying. You weren’t shouting. You weren’t doing anything that would’ve made most people stop and look.

But Pope knew you now. Not entirely, not in the way he wanted to.

Enough.

He knew the normal rhythm of your voice when you were tired. Knew the brighter, forced version you used around strangers and the quiet version you used when Henry was close to being overwhelmed. He knew your dry little laugh when you realised you’d said too much. He knew how you said his name when you were surprised to see him and how you stretched out okay when you were trying to convince yourself something really was.

This voice was too flat.

Too carefully held.

Pope shut the door behind him and checked the lock without thinking, turning it until he heard the deadbolt settle. The extra latch was already in place above it. You had added another one after your husband showed up.

You were standing at the kitchen counter with your back half-turned to him. One hand was pressed against the edge hard enough that the tendons stood out beneath your skin. The other held a piece of paper you weren’t reading anymore.

There were more pages spread across the counter.

White paper, black ink. A yellow legal envelope lying open beside it; You tried to hide the tears before you faced him.

He saw you lift your fingers to the corner of one eye. Saw the quick swipe, the irritated blink. Like you were angry at your own face for showing what you were feeling. But your nose was red. Your cheeks were flushed unevenly. Your breathing had that faint catch in it, barely there, the way it did when you’d been trying not to cry for too long.

Pope stopped near the edge of the living room.

He wanted to ask what was wrong, the question rose immediately, blunt and hard in his throat.

He wanted to ask who had done it; more than that, he wanted to ask how to fix it but you were moving too much. From the counter to the sink. From the sink to the fridge. Opening the fridge without taking anything out, then shutting it again. Picking up a dishcloth and folding it, unfolding it, folding it again.

You couldn’t stay still for more than five seconds.

Pope waited.

He’d learned that about you, too. If he pushed while you were moving, you’d make a joke. You’d offer him coffee. You’d ask about Craig or the weather or whether the gate was still holding properly.

You’d do anything except tell the truth before you were ready.

So Pope stood silently while Henry worked the R into the wrong space, pulled it back out and tried again.

Finally, you placed both palms flat against the counter and stayed there.

Pope looked at the paperwork, “What happened?”

You flinched as if you’d forgotten he was in the room, then you looked at him and attempted a smile, “It’s fine.”

It wasn’t even a convincing lie.

Pope’s gaze dropped to the pages again. You saw it and shifted slightly, not enough to block them. He wondered whether you were too exhausted to stop him or whether this was something else.

Trust, maybe.

The thought landed uncomfortably inside his chest; You trusted him enough not to hide the weapon.

“It doesn’t—” Your voice caught. You cleared your throat, pressing your lips together until the break disappeared. “It doesn’t matter.”

Pope walked toward the counter and you didn’t move to stop him.

That mattered. Months ago, you would’ve gathered the pages up. You would’ve laughed too loudly and shoved them into a drawer. You would’ve created distance between him and anything that might make you vulnerable.

Now you let him come close.

Not touching close.

Close enough to read.

The heading was formal. A petition. Temporary custody. Proposed arrangements. Statements written in the kind of bloodless language people used when they wanted cruelty to look reasonable.

Pope read slowly.

He wasn’t stupid, regardless of what people thought when they heard the pauses in his speech or watched him struggle to fit a thought into words. He understood paperwork. He understood contracts, police reports, court records and the way an official sentence could hide a threat behind neutral language. Your husband wanted primary custody.

Not twenty percent.

Not weekends.

Not even the twenty-eighty agreement you had mentioned over breakfast.

Almost everything.

The pages described you as unstable. Financially insecure. Unable to provide consistent care without support. They mentioned your reduced work hours. The late bills. The move to Oceanside. Every difficult thing you had ever survived had been rearranged into evidence that Henry should be taken from you.

Pope felt his jaw lock.

Henry placed the R into its correct slot, “R,” he said again, pleased.

“Good words, buddy,” you replied, your voice cracking around the edges.

The contrast made something vicious move through Pope.

Henry was sitting five feet away, safe and calm because of you because you knew the jam had to go over butter. Because you understood that Oh no, little baby, what happened? meant he’d hurt himself. Because you kept tyres in your pockets for him to chew and installed locks high enough that he couldn’t reach them. Because you worked less so that he had someone who understood him when the rest of the world became too loud.

The man who had lasted one night alone with his own son was telling a court that you were incapable.

Pope could picture him still. Maroon Henley. Dark hair. Boot wedged in your door.

Pope’s fingers curled against the counter.

He could make this stop.

The thought came with the same cold clarity as a plan.

He could find out where the man lived. It wouldn’t take long. Follow him for a few days. Learn when he left for work, where he parked, whether he lived alone. Pope could put him in a room and make him understand that Henry wasn’t a bargaining chip and you weren’t property he could keep through signatures and court dates.

He could put divorce papers in front of the man and hold his hand steady until every page was signed.

Simple.

Clean.

Effective.

The anger wasn’t wild, that was what made it dangerous. It settled into Pope’s muscles with purpose, drawing his shoulders tight and slowing his breathing.

Then you looked at him.

Your eyes were still wet, and there was something open in them that stopped the plan before it could fully form.

You trusted him.

Not with everything. Not yet; But with this.

You had let him read the papers. Let him see your face when you couldn’t hold it together. Let him stand in your home while Henry played on the rug and you had nothing polished left to give. The feelings Pope had for you had been growing so quietly he hadn’t known when it became something he couldn’t ignore.

With you, Pope didn’t imagine becoming clean.

He imagined becoming honest, that was worse.

That was more dangerous.

Because when he looked at you now—red nose, flushed cheeks, hands shaking over custody papers—he didn’t want you to save him. He didn’t want you to make him normal.

He wanted to stay.

He wanted to be someone you could fall apart in front of without regretting it afterward. He wanted to take the papers out of your hands and carry some of the weight, even though he didn’t know how.

And the fact that he wanted anything that badly terrified him.

You wiped beneath your eye again and gave him another strained smile, “What brings you over anyway?” you asked, as though the answer mattered. As though you weren’t standing beside documents designed to take your entire life apart. “Did you need something?”

Pope stared at you.

You were doing it again. Redirecting. Making yourself useful. Giving him an escape from your pain so he wouldn’t have to be uncomfortable.

He looked back down at the petition, “It matters,” he said.

Your smile faltered.

Pope tapped one finger against the page. Not hard, but enough that the paper shifted, “This.”

You swallowed. “Andrew—”

“He wants Henry.”

The words came out low and flat.

You folded your arms tightly across your chest, a barrier built too late; “He wants to punish me,” you corrected quietly. “Henry’s just how he’s doing it.”

Pope already knew that.

Hearing you say it still made his anger sharpen. He thought again about asking where the man lived. The question sat ready behind his teeth.

Instead, Pope forced his hands open, “You got a good lawyer?”

You gave a tired laugh that contained no humour, “I have a lawyer.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Your eyes met his.

For one second, Pope thought you might snap at him. A spark of irritation moved across your face, and he welcomed it. Anger looked better on you than shame. Anger meant there was still fight left.

Then the fight sagged beneath exhaustion.

“But, you know, family court is slow,” you said. “And expensive. And apparently everyone involved gets paid by the hour, so there’s no real incentive for anyone to stop sending twelve-page letters saying the exact same thing in increasingly creative legal language.”

You gestured toward the pages.

Pope glanced at the envelope. The name of the law firm sat printed in the corner.

He memorised it without trying.

“And he has money,” you continued. “Not unlimited money, but enough. Enough to keep going longer than I can.”

Your voice went quieter on the final sentence.

There it was.

The weapon beneath the paperwork.

Not that your husband had a stronger case, that he could afford to exhaust you.

Pope understood endurance as violence. Not the loud kind. Not the kind that left blood on the floor or bruises blooming beneath skin. This was quieter. Cleaner. The kind of violence people could commit while wearing suits, speaking politely and sending letters on expensive stationery.

Smurf had used it against all of them.

She knew pressure didn’t have to break a person immediately. Sometimes it worked better if it didn’t. You applied it slowly. Consistently. You made every day slightly harder than the one before it. You withheld affection, money, safety—whatever someone needed most—and then waited.

Eventually resistance became more painful than surrender.

Eventually people stopped fighting because they were too tired to remember what they had been fighting for.

Smurf had built an entire family that way. She could make Craig crawl back with money, Deran with guilt, Baz with power. With Pope, it had always been love—or whatever warped, conditional imitation of it she had taught him to recognise as love. She would pull him close, call him her baby, make him feel useful, then withdraw everything the second he stepped beyond the limits she had drawn for him.

A leash didn’t need to be visible to work.

Your husband understood that too.

Different house. Different weapon. Same strategy.

“He thinks you’ll give up,” Pope said.

His voice came out low and certain. He was still staring at the papers on your counter, at the neat blocks of legal language that tried to make cruelty sound reasonable.

You looked down at Henry instead of answering immediately.

Henry had moved on to the letter S, running his thumb slowly over the painted curve. The puzzle piece was bright yellow, worn along one edge where his teeth had found it more than once before you’d redirected him to the little black lego tyre. He turned it around in his hand, studying it from every angle as if the shape might change if he looked long enough.

“S,” Henry murmured.

You watched him with an expression Pope had come to understand over the last few months.

Love first.

Fear underneath it.

Always fear underneath it.

“No,” you said at last, your eyes still on your son, “He thinks I’ll run out of money.”

There was no self-pity in your voice. That made it worse.

You said it like a fact. Like gravity. Like the inevitable conclusion to an equation you had worked through too many times to pretend the answer might change.

Pope’s gaze shifted to the pile of unopened mail near the fruit bowl.

It wasn’t even hidden anymore.

When he’d first started coming inside, you used to turn the envelopes face down or sweep them into a drawer when you caught him looking. Now they sat in plain view: electricity, water, insurance, something from your lawyer, something from a debt collector. White envelopes with red ink. Final notices. Amount overdue. Late fees added to late fees, the quiet accumulation of punishments for not having enough money in the first place.

The world liked to charge poor people extra for being poor.

Pope understood that kind of logic. The Cody jobs had started in places like that—rent due, food running low, Smurf saying there was money out there and only cowards waited for permission to take it. Eventually they had stopped pretending they stole because they needed to. But the beginning had mattered.

Need could make almost anything seem reasonable.

He looked back at you, “How much?”

Your head lifted. “What?”

“The lawyer.”

The question changed your face immediately.

Not dramatically. You didn’t recoil or tell him to mind his business. But suspicion tightened the corners of your eyes. Your shoulders drew back from the counter. Your arms folded loosely across your stomach, as if your body had decided to guard itself before your mind caught up.

Pope regretted the question as soon as he saw it because he knew what it sounded like.

Money offered with a hand already reaching for ownership.

Smurf had never paid for anything without buying part of the person along with it. Rent, cars, legal trouble, jobs—she called it taking care of family, but the bill always arrived eventually. Sometimes months later. Sometimes years. She would drag up every dollar she had ever spent and lay it at your feet like evidence that your life belonged to her.

Pope didn’t want you looking at him and seeing that.

He didn’t want you hearing How much? and thinking, What will he want from me afterward?

His eyes dropped back to the custody petition and for a moment, he thought about Lena.

He had done everything backward with Lena.

He had wanted to keep her close because closeness felt like protection. He had wanted to surround her with money, walls, people who would make sure she never understood what it was to go without. Every job, every risk, every envelope of cash could be turned into a justification if he looked at it the right way.

College. Rent. Food. A life where Lena didn’t have to stand at a kitchen counter staring at bills and deciding which one could survive being ignored for another week.

He had continued working jobs after prison because criminal work was the only kind of work the Codys had ever properly taught him. And when Lena was still close enough for him to pretend he could build her a future, he had told himself the money could become something clean once it reached her.

That was the lie men like Pope lived on.

The money was dirty. The reason didn’t have to be.

He had imagined Lena older without really knowing what older looked like. A place of her own. Tuition paid. A fridge with food inside it. A car that started every morning. No one using money to tell her where she belonged. He had wanted to give her the kind of safety cash could buy because he hadn’t known how to give her the kind it couldn’t.

In the end, the safest thing he had ever given Lena was distance from him.

He had let her go.

Now, looking at you, Pope wondered whether anyone had ever been willing to take risks for you like that.

Not own you. Not rescue you so they could remind you later, just take some of the weight off your shoulders.

Had anyone ever looked at the impossible numbers in front of you and thought, Fine. Then they’re mine too?

Your husband clearly hadn’t. He had money, or at least enough of it to keep paying someone to frighten you. Enough to make family court into a waiting game he believed he could win. Enough to turn time into another weapon.

Pope had money.

Cody money.

Cash that never looked quite right in a bank account and couldn’t be explained without questions. Money made from safes and heists and fear. Money that could pay your lawyer but might poison everything between you the second he placed it in your hands.

He could solve the cost; He didn’t know how to solve what the offer would mean.

“It doesn’t matter,” you told him. “I’ve got it sorted.”

Pope stared at you.

You absolutely did not have it sorted.

He could tell by the unopened envelopes. By the way you had started buying the cheaper coffee even though you complained it tasted like burnt dirt. By the small repair in the knee of Henry’s trousers. By the fact that you hadn’t replaced the microwave even though it only worked if you slammed the door twice.

You were winging it.

Moving money from one bill to another. Paying enough to stop one company from calling while another sent a final notice. Hoping the lawyer wouldn’t ask for another retainer before you found a way to scrape it together. Hoping for the best because hope was currently cheaper than a court application.

You turned away from him and leaned back against the sink. Your palms pressed into the edge behind you, your shoulders hunching as if you needed the counter to hold up part of your weight.

“I just…” Your eyes lowered to the floor.

Pope waited.

He had learned not to fill the gaps when you were trying to talk. If he interrupted, you used the interruption as an exit. You would smile, make some dry comment and retreat before the truth could finish leaving your mouth.

“Every time I think it’s done,” you began, “every time I think we’ve come to an agreement, he comes at me with something else.” Your fingers tightened around the edge of the sink, “First he said he’d sign if I didn’t ask for anything. So I didn’t. I didn’t ask for the house. I didn’t ask for money. I didn’t ask for half of anything because I just wanted out.”

Pope felt his jaw tighten.

You had been trying to purchase freedom by leaving everything behind.

Your husband had taken the payment and kept the cage locked anyway.

“Then it was visitation,” you continued. “Then it was the custody split. Then it was that I’d moved without consulting him, even though he knew I was moving. Then it was that Henry needs consistency and apparently that means staying near a father who has seen him three times in the last year.”

The bitterness in your voice sharpened with every sentence.

Good, Pope thought. He preferred your anger to your shame. Anger meant you still understood this wasn’t your fault.

You rubbed at your forehead, pressing two fingers between your eyebrows, “And I’m so tired.”

The anger vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared.

That frightened Pope more.

“I’m tired of not being able to relax,” you said. “I’m tired of not sleeping. I’m tired of checking my phone and wondering what new thing he’s decided I’ve done wrong.”

Pope’s eyes flicked toward the front door, the additional bolt sat high above the handle. The chain was drawn across even though it was the middle of the afternoon. Your phone was face down on the table, but Pope had noticed it vibrating twice since he arrived.

You continued, quieter now, “I’m tired of thinking about what’s going to happen to Henry if he gets sent to his father.” Your voice caught, you swallowed hard and stared at your son.

Henry was still occupied with the puzzle. The S hovered over the board as he searched for its place, unaware that two adults were standing ten feet away discussing where a court might decide he belonged.

“He doesn’t know him,” you said. “Not really. He doesn’t know what the different sounds mean. He doesn’t know that Henry saying ‘oh no, little baby’ means he’s hurt himself. He doesn’t know he’ll only eat the toast if the butter is underneath the jam, or that if you cut it into triangles instead of squares he sometimes won’t touch it.”

Pope listened.

“He doesn’t know the difference between Henry being upset and Henry being overloaded. He thinks every meltdown is bad behaviour. He thinks if Henry doesn’t respond, he’s ignoring him on purpose,” Your eyes filled again, but this time you didn’t turn away quickly enough to hide it, “What happens when Henry’s screaming and he can’t make it stop?” you asked, your voice almost breaking. “What happens when he bites or hits because he can’t communicate and his father decides he needs discipline?”

Pope’s hand curled against the counter.

He knew exactly what could happen when an adult treated distress like disobedience. Smurf had built whole punishments out of that misunderstanding.

“What happens when Henry runs?” you continued. “He doesn’t check locks. He doesn’t think he should have to. He used to get angry at me for putting latches up because he said they made the house look ridiculous.”

Pope glanced again at the bolt. The locks weren’t ridiculous, they were the reason Henry was still inside the house.

You dragged in a breath that shook on the way down, “I keep thinking about him waking up somewhere that isn’t here. Looking for me. Not understanding why I’m gone.” Your mouth twisted, trying and failing to contain the grief of a thing that hadn’t happened yet, “He’ll think I left him.”

Pope’s chest tightened so quickly it felt like impact.

For one second he saw Lena—not as she had been when he last watched her from a distance, safe and settled, but younger. Confused. Waiting for adults who kept disappearing. Wondering whether she had done something wrong.

He saw Julia, too.

People always thought abandonment was about the person who left. It wasn’t. Not to a kid. A kid turned it inward. A kid built explanations out of themselves because that was easier than accepting the adults around them had failed.

Pope couldn’t let Henry believe you had left him.

The thought arrived without qualification.

Not he didn’t want it.

He couldn’t let it happen.

He could plan robberies.

He could study a building until he knew where every camera pointed, how long a guard took to walk his route, what street would be clear at a certain time. He could account for vehicles, weapons, witnesses and mistakes. He could create contingencies for contingencies until the thing in front of him felt small enough to control.

He could plan violence down to the second; But he couldn’t work out how to help you without making you feel like you owed him.

Money would solve part of it.

Money would also look like a chain if he handled it wrong.

He wanted to say, I’ll pay.

He wanted to place enough cash on the counter that you never had to look at another red notice again. He wanted to make the lawyer answer every letter, file every motion and keep fighting until your husband ran out of spite or breath.

But Pope knew you. You would refuse.

Not because you didn’t need it, but because you would rather drown than discover the lifeboat had a rope tied around your ankle.

He needed another route.

A way to help that didn’t require you to take anything directly from him. A way to understand what was happening before he acted. Information first. Plan second.

“Who’s your lawyer?”

You blinked at him.

“What?”

“Your lawyer,” Pope repeated, slower this time. “Who is it?”

Your eyes narrowed slightly. “Why?”

Pope looked back down at the petition.

The law firm’s name was already printed on the letterhead, but he wanted to hear you say it. He wanted to know whether you trusted this person. Whether they returned calls. Whether they were any good or simply the only one you could afford.

“Because you said you had one,” Pope replied.

“I do,” Your mouth tightened.

Pope could see the wall going up again. The instinct to protect what little control you had left.

He softened his voice—not by much, but enough, “Are they good?”

You hesitated slightly, “They’re… fine,” you said at last.

Pope stared at you and stayed quiet.

“Andrew.”

“Fine doesn’t keep him from taking Henry.”

Your face went pale.

Pope regretted the bluntness immediately, but he couldn’t take the words back. He didn’t know how to wrap danger in softer language. He only knew how to point at it.

You looked down at the floor, “No,” you said quietly. “It doesn’t.”

Pope’s anger shifted,  he took the lawyer’s letter from the counter and read the name printed beneath the signature for a second time.

Marianne Keller. Keller Family Law.

Pope fixed it into his memory.

The address too.

He didn’t need to write things down when they mattered. His brain held onto details differently when there was a threat attached to them—the name on a security uniform, a licence plate, the timing of a camera sweep, the exact position of a lock. Once something became part of a problem he intended to solve, it stayed.

He placed the letter back on the counter in precisely the same spot, “I’m not giving you money,” he said.

Your head lifted sharply.

The movement was so immediate Pope knew he had guessed correctly. Whatever you had expected him to say, it had involved money. An offer. An argument. Another person deciding what was best for you and demanding you be grateful for it.

Pope forced himself to meet your eyes.

It was harder than facing a gun. Guns were simple. A gun pointed at him meant danger. A finger moving toward the trigger meant act first. There were only so many outcomes, and Pope understood every one of them.

Your expression wasn’t simple.

There was suspicion there, but not only suspicion. Fear. Pride. Exhaustion. The faint embarrassment of someone who hated being seen when they were struggling. The guarded look of a woman who had learned that help was rarely free and that generosity could become evidence against you later.

Pope understood that look because Smurf had put it on all her children eventually.

“I know you won’t take it,” he continued. “And I’m not gonna make you.”

Some of the tension left your shoulders, but not all of it. Your arms remained folded over your stomach. Not defensive enough to be obvious, but Pope noticed the way your fingers curled into the fabric at your sides.

“Then why do you want to know who my lawyer is?”

Pope looked down at the letter again; He thought about telling you he wanted to check the lawyer out.

That sounded like he didn’t trust your judgement.

He thought about saying he knew people who could find out whether Marianne Keller was competent, whether she had ever been disciplined, whether she won cases or simply kept sending bills until her clients could no longer afford to answer the phone.

That sounded like what it was: surveillance.

He wanted to tell you the truth; Because if you won’t take the money, I can bypass you and give it directly to the lawyer.

But he knew how that sounded too.

It sounded like your answer didn’t matter. Like no was merely an obstacle and Pope was already searching for a quieter way around it.

It sounded like Smurf.

The comparison turned his stomach.

Smurf never accepted a boundary she didn’t like. She smiled, changed direction and found another point of entry. If one of her boys wouldn’t take money from her hand, she paid a debt behind his back and waited until the favour became useful. She called it love because the word control wasn’t warm enough.

Pope didn’t want to control you.

He didn’t want to buy a place in your house or make you feel as though every cup of coffee, every conversation over the fence and every moment with Henry existed because he had paid for the privilege.

But he did want the problem gone.

That was the part of himself he couldn’t make gentle.

Pope saw a threat and removed it. He found a weak point and reinforced it. He saw someone he cared about drowning and couldn’t understand why he should remain on the shore merely because they were too frightened to take his hand.

Cared about.

The words passed through his mind before he could stop them.

His eyes shifted to you.

You were standing against the sink in an old shirt, your hair pulled back badly, your face still blotched from tears you had tried to hide. There was nothing polished about the moment. Nothing romantic in the way people usually imagined romance.

There were dirty breakfast plates beside you. A stack of legal papers on the counter. Henry’s abandoned chew near the fruit bowl. A damp patch on your sleeve where you had wiped your face too quickly.

Still, Pope felt something draw tight beneath his ribs.

He had started noticing too much.

The tiny line between your eyebrows when you were calculating money in your head. The way you checked Henry’s location every few seconds even when he was sitting safely within sight. The different versions of your laugh—the real one that escaped before you could control it and the thinner one you used when you were trying to make something painful sound funny.

He knew which mug you reached for first in the morning. He knew you forgot to drink your coffee while it was hot. He knew you touched the lock after closing the door, even when you had watched it click.

He knew you said I’ve got it sorted when what you meant was I don’t have another option.

Pope didn’t know when learning those things had stopped being observation and become affection.

Maybe it had happened slowly enough that he hadn’t recognised the danger.

A gate fixed here. A conversation there. Henry’s hand in his, pulling him toward a missing puzzle piece as though Pope’s presence required no explanation. You looking over the fence and smiling when you saw him, not because you needed something but because you were glad he was there.

Nobody had ever made Pope feel wanted in such an ordinary way.

There had always been a function attached to him. Smurf wanted what he could do. The family wanted him when something needed force, planning or cleaning up. Even affection had usually come wrapped around usefulness.

You asked him inside for breakfast.

You gave him coffee; You talked too much when you were nervous and then looked embarrassed, as though he might resent being trusted with the details of your day.

Pope didn’t resent it. In fact, he collected every detail.

He carried them home with him.

“Because I want to make sure they know what they’re doing,” he said finally.

Your mouth tightened slightly, “You’re going to investigate my lawyer?”

“No.” The answer came too quickly.

Your eyebrows lifted.

Pope corrected himself. “Maybe.”

Despite everything, a breath of laughter escaped you. It was quiet and damp around the edges, but it was real.

The sound went through him like warmth. Pope’s face remained mostly still, but something softened behind his eyes. He would have done more than investigate a lawyer to hear that sound again without the exhaustion beneath it.

“Andrew,” you said, his name carrying a warning that wasn’t particularly convincing.

“What?”

“You can’t intimidate my lawyer.”

“I didn’t say I was gonna intimidate anyone.”

“You didn’t say you weren’t.”

Pope glanced at the letter, “I won’t intimidate your lawyer.”

The pause before lawyer was small.

You noticed it. Your eyes narrowed. “Or anyone else involved in my custody case.”

Pope looked back at you.

That was harder to promise.

Your husband had put his boot in your doorway. He had used Henry to keep you frightened and legal paperwork to make the fear look respectable. Pope could picture several effective ways of removing him from the situation. None of them involved family court.

You held his gaze, waiting.

Pope’s jaw shifted, “I’m not gonna do anything that hurts your case,” he said.

It was not the promise you had requested.

You knew it.

Pope knew you knew it.

But after a long moment, you let out a tired breath and looked toward Henry, who had started lining the puzzle pieces along the edge of the rug instead of putting them into the board, “That is disturbingly specific.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Not necessarily comforting.”

Pope’s mouth pulled faintly at one corner. He watched your shoulders loosen another fraction, and the feeling inside him deepened—quiet, possessive only in the sense that he wanted to protect this moment from whatever came next.

Not possessive of you.

He was becoming careful about that distinction.

You belonged to yourself. That was the whole point.

Your husband treated you like something he could keep by refusing to sign his name. Smurf treated people like extensions of herself. Pope had spent too much of his life confusing love with ownership to pretend he didn’t recognise the danger.

Whatever was growing inside him could not be that.

He would not make you another thing caught in a Cody grip.

He looked down at the letter one last time.

Marianne Keller.

“I’m just gonna check,” he said.

“Check what?”

“That she’s good.”

“And what happens if she isn’t?”

Pope’s eyes moved back to yours, “I find someone who is.”

You stared at him as though trying to decide whether his certainty made you feel safer or more nervous. Probably both. That was usually what Pope did to people.

You rubbed your palms against your arms. “I can’t afford someone better.”

Part 1: Well, That Stick Has Ruined My Morning. You could say it.

They were only words.

Two of them, technically. Tiny, ordinary words. You’d said worse in kitchens at full tilt with a printer screaming and three people asking stupid questions at once. You’d said harder things to people you liked less, with less sleep, and more mascara running. Separately, the words were nothing. Harmless. Manageable.

Together, they were enough to make your stomach turn over so hard it felt personal.

I’m pregnant.

You stared at yourself in the bathroom mirror like your reflection might volunteer to do it for you.

It did not.

The little ensuite in the hotel here in Yosemite was too small for a crisis of this size. The sink was narrow, the light above the mirror too fluorescent that made you look even worse than you felt, the window cracked just enough to let in a seam of mountain-cold air that lifted the damp hair at the back of your neck. Your toothbrush hung useless in your hand, toothpaste foam cooling in your mouth while your brain ran itself into a wall over and over again.

You looked ridiculous.

Hair loose and sleep-mussed. One of Shane’s dark blue shirts hanging off you, the hem barely decent, one side slipping low enough to show the curve of your shoulder. Your skin looked annoyingly good, which felt like betrayal on a molecular level. Fresh air, less stress, actual sleep when Shane forced you into it, less city grime. Yosemite had done wonders for your face.

Fantastic.

You’d add that to the pros list the next time he tried the whole move closer to me conversation in that maddeningly calm voice of his, like he was discussing weather patterns and not the possibility of uprooting your life.

Pros:

Skin clear.

Boyfriend stupidly hot.

Unfortunately pregnant.

You spat toothpaste into the sink with more force than strictly necessary and rinsed your mouth, eyes never leaving your own.

How the hell were you pregnant?

You had been careful.

You had used protection. Every time, except maybe that one time but that barely counted because you’d both been half asleep and very much in love and very stupid in that specific way people get when they think, well, what are the odds? You’d done the responsible adult things. The deeply unsexy, practical things. The things people in pamphlets and women’s health articles told you to do if you wanted to remain a person with agency and not become a cautionary tale with stretch marks.

You even went to the bathroom after because UTIs were no joke and you were not about to let romance make you medically negligent.

You stared harder at yourself.

Actually, scratch that.

You knew exactly how you were pregnant.

You were not, tragically, the Virgin Mary.

You were just a woman in a borrowed shirt in a bathroom in Yosemite, trying very hard not to throw up from anxiety before nine in the morning. Your laugh came out thin and hysterical enough that if anyone else had heard it, they’d have started backing away slowly.

“Okay,” you whispered to the mirror.

Your voice sounded nothing like yours. Too high. Too careful. Like if you moved too fast the whole room might crack down the middle.

“Okay,” you said again, because repetition had always felt vaguely like control.

It was fine.

It was.

You were an adult.

Shane was an adult.

The two of you could have an adult conversation in an adult way about this very adult situation that had arrived in your life like a fucking wrecking ball. Never mind that the two of you had never actually discussed this.

Not really.

Not in the one year and six months you’d been together.

There had been jokes. Passing comments. The occasional god, can you imagine? when a toddler had a public breakdown in Trader Joe’s or when you and him had stood in an elevator with a screaming baby and the mother trying to shush them while apologising to you at the same time. But never a real conversation. Never a sit-down, eye-contact, what do we want? what would we do? kind of conversation.

Because, if you were being honest, you’d both behaved like the future was this vague, generous thing that would wait for you both to be ready.

Apparently not.

You both still drove between cities and towns once a week, that had turned into once every two weeks once you both realised that a six-hour round trip every weekend was actually exhausting and not really maintainable in reality. You dragged both hands down your face and inhaled through your nose.

The room smelled like Shane. Soap. Pine. The faint, warm cotton smell of clothes that had been slept in. Under it, the chill mineral scent of mountain air coming through the cracked window. Out in the other room, it was quiet in that particular morning way—floorboards settled, kettle not yet on, no radio crackling at his shoulder, no boots moving around. He was still asleep.

Of course he was.

Because the universe loved a joke and apparently since day one of you meeting this man you were the absolute fucking butt of them all.

You pictured him in bed—half on his stomach, one arm shoved under the pillow, hair a mess, face soft in sleep in that way he never let the waking world see. One knee bent up because the mattress in the Yosemite rental was too soft for his back but he tolerated it because you liked it. Mouth slightly open. Breathing deep and even. Completely unaware that in the bathroom ten feet away you were trying not to have a religious experience over a stick of plastic that was still sitting in the bottom of your bag.

God.

You could just show him the test.

That was an option.

A valid option.

You could walk out there, pull it out, hold it up between two fingers like evidence in a murder trial, and let him do the math himself. Let him say it first. Let him be the brave one for once.

You could almost picture it.

His face going still.

His eyes dropping to the test, then back to yours.

The silence.

Maybe he’d take it from you. Maybe he’d stare at it too long. Maybe he’d say your name first in that low voice he used when he already knew that this wasn’t something you were going to make a joke about because you were going to throw up instead. Maybe he’d say, Are you sure? which, fair. Maybe he’d say nothing for just long enough to make your soul leave your body and take up residence in the heating vent.

You clutched the edge of the sink.

No.

No, if you did that, he would look at you with those stupid steady eyes and you would immediately burst into tears like a child and he would hug you and say all the right things to make you feel better but nothing actually helpful except “I’ll stand by you no matter what,” like the stupid sensible asshole he was. You needed at least ten more minutes of pretending to be a person with executive function.

“Jesus Christ,” you muttered.

From the bedroom, nothing. No movement. No voice. No miraculous intervention coming from the sky that would do all the hard work for you.

Coward, your inner voice said.

You glared at yourself. Your reflection, unsurprisingly, did the same. You looked pale now. Less dewy mountain-skin miracle, more woman about to announce life-altering news in her boyfriend’s shirt while trying not to disassociate.

You reached for your brush just to have something to do and ran it through your hair too hard. It snagged at the ends. Good. Pain. Useful. Grounding.

You could do this.

You could.

You’d done harder things.

You’d left cities. Rebuilt kitchens. Loved a man who lived half in wilderness and half in silence and somehow taught him how to let himself be loved back. You had survived weddings, disasters, raccoons, rumors, breakups, awful bosses, your own brain, and a truly humiliating phase in high school where you thought low-rise jeans were a personal right.

You could say two words.

Your hand paused mid-brush.

Unless he didn’t want this.

There it was. The thought you’d been sprinting away from finally catching you by the hair.

Your stomach dropped so hard you had to grab the sink again. Not because Shane would be cruel. Not because he’d be angry. Not because he’d ever, ever make this harder than it already was.

That was the problem.

He’d be kind.

He’d go quiet first, because he always did when something mattered. He’d think before he spoke. He’d ask if you were okay before he asked how he felt. He’d make coffee. He’d sit you down. He’d put one hand on the back of your neck, thumb under your ear, and say we’ll figure it out.

And maybe he would mean it.

Maybe he’d mean every word.

But what if underneath all that steadiness was the truth that he hadn’t wanted this? Not now. Not like this. Not before a thousand conversations you’d both failed to have.

Your throat tightened. The room suddenly felt too bright, too close, too full of every future at once.

A baby.

Shane holding a baby.

Shane absolutely refusing to admit he’d cry and then crying anyway. Tiny socks hanging to dry in the Yosemite sun.

The thought arrived first because apparently your brain had decided subtlety was for weaker women. Tiny white socks clipped to a line outside, moving in the high clear mountain air like surrender flags. So small. So offensively small. Little things made for a person who did not exist yet and somehow already had the power to ruin your composure before breakfast.

Then the next thought hit hard enough to make your grip tighten on the sink.

You, back in the city, nauseous and furious and alone for weeks at a time while Shane tried to make the drive work. Your apartment with its slightly warped floorboards and the upstairs neighbors who lived like they were training for a hoofed migration. The smell of hot pavement and garbage day in summer. You sitting on the edge of your bed with a bucket between your knees, hating everyone. Missing him. Resenting that you missed him. Resenting him for being somewhere all that sky and silence still fit around him while you tried not to throw up into municipal plumbing.

A cot in a tent and a child you could never put in it.

That one cut deepest.

Not because you thought Shane would suggest something that stupid. He wouldn’t. But because the image of his life—his actual life, the shape of it, the limitations of it—suddenly stood up in full, impossible detail. Canvas walls. Ground pad. Lantern light. The clean practical solitude of a man who could live out of a pack for days and somehow make it look like a philosophy instead of an inconvenience. You had spent a year and a half loving him in pieces and practicalities and now all of it was rearranging itself around a new fact.

His hand on your stomach.

Your mother’s face when you told her.

Mark’s face, God help you.

Brian and Gabe losing their entire collective minds.

The life you thought you had arranged for yourself tilting, then tilting more, then becoming something else entirely.

And underneath all of it—quieter, smaller, somehow more terrifying than panic—was the tiny glowing fact that some part of you was already protecting this.

Not deciding. Not planning. Not ready.

Just protecting.

Like your body had picked a side before your brain had even found the ballot.

The nausea hit so fast it felt personal.

One second you were staring at yourself in the little bathroom mirror, pale and wide-eyed in Shane’s oversized shirt, and the next your mouth flooded with that awful sharp water that meant you had maybe five seconds before this became a housekeeping issue.

“Oh, no,” you whispered to no one.

You lunged for the sink just in time.

It was not elegant.

There was nothing cinematic about it, nothing delicate or tragic. Just the humiliating violence of your stomach deciding it had opinions about the morning and wanted them heard immediately. Your hands braced hard on either side of the basin, hair dropping forward like it had joined the attack, shoulders tightening under the thin cotton of his shirt while you threw up once, hard enough to make your eyes sting.

You stayed bent over the sink afterward, breathing through your mouth, the tap still off, the room too bright. The toothpaste-and-pine smell of the bathroom had been replaced by acid and panic and the thin cold line of fresh air coming through the cracked window above the toilet.

Your eyes watered.

Your throat burned.

You could hear the blood rushing in your ears.

The floorboard in the other room creaked and then he was there.

Shane appeared in the doorway half asleep and somehow more awake than you had ever been in your life.

His hair was wrecked from sleep, one side flattened, the other sticking up in a way that would have been funny if your life wasn’t currently trying to fold itself inside out. He had on a grey t-shirt and sleep-soft flannel pants, bare feet on the cold floorboards, one hand still half braced against the doorframe like his body had arrived before the rest of him. But his eyes—those were already fully awake. Focused. Locked on you.

“Hey,” he said immediately, low and rough.

He crossed to you in two steps, turned the tap on without needing to think about it, and put a hand between your shoulder blades.

Not pressing. Not fussing. Solid.

Warm.

His palm moved slow once, twice, up and down your back while the water ran cool and clean over the porcelain.

“Hey,” he said again, quieter now. “You okay?”

A braver woman would have spilled then and there.

A braver woman would have turned around with shaking hands and wet eyes and just said the words. She would have let the cards fall where they may. She would have trusted him enough—or herself enough—not to stall.

But you were not, at this exact moment, a braver woman.

You were a woman who had thought once about disappointing her boyfriend and then, very stupidly, allowed that thought to set up camp in her ribcage and stayed.

No.

No, because that was the thought that kept catching its sleeve on everything.

Shane did deer and bears and raccoons and fences and missing hikers and stubborn chefs from San Francisco.

He didn’t do babies.

Your hand shook as you cupped some water and rinsed your mouth. Shane reached up with his free hand, gathering your hair out of the way and tucking it behind your ear with that maddeningly gentle practicality that always made everything worse.

“You’re burning up,” he murmured.

“I think Brian’s trying to poison me,” you said hoarsely, still bent over the sink. “I feel awful.”

You heard, rather than saw, the faint shift in his expression.

Because yes, objectively, that was ridiculous. But it was also the exact kind of thing you would say when you were trying very hard not to say the thing you actually meant.

His hand stilled against your back for half a second before continuing.

“Mm,” he said, in a tone that was deeply unconvinced. “Brian’s method’s gotten more ambitious, then.”

You let out a weak laugh that hurt your throat.

The water kept running.

You stayed facing the sink because turning around felt like walking straight into a wall you’d built yourself.

Behind you, Shane leaned one hip lightly against the vanity, staying close enough that you could feel him there without him crowding you. The little bathroom held the shape of him too easily: broad shoulders in the mirror behind yours, one hand still at your back, the quiet smell of sleep and cotton and skin and the mountain cold he always seemed to bring in with him.

He was watching you carefully now.

You could see it in the mirror without having to face him.

The furrow between his brows. The way his head tipped slightly, reading you. The stillness.

Your heart started doing that awful uneven thing again.

You took another sip from the tap just to buy yourself a second.

Then another. And then you straightened too fast, shut the tap off, and pressed the heels of your hands into the counter as if the cheap laminate might keep you from floating clean up and out of your own body.

For one horrible second, the room tilted anyway.

The bathroom was too bright. Too small. Too full of the sound of your own blood in your ears. The mirror gave you back a version of yourself that looked pale and wild-eyed and deeply unconvinced by her own coping mechanisms. Behind you, in the reflection, Shane stood in the doorway in sleep-soft greys and bare feet, one hand still braced against the frame, his face sharpened by concern and the kind of quiet attention that always made lying feel like amateur theatre.

He waited.

Of course he did.

Shane always waited.

He waited when you were furious and talking too fast, letting you burn through the first layer of temper before he answered. He waited in kitchens while you found the exact right word for what you meant, even if everyone else in the room had already decided they understood. He waited on trails when your pride made you insist you were fine, half a step back and to the outside, like patience itself had learned to wear flannel. He waited the first time you kissed him back, the first time you said you loved him, the first time you cried in front of him and tried to pass it off as allergies and rage. He waited at your worst with the same maddening steadiness he used at your best, like there was never a version of you he wasn’t prepared to stand still for.

So he waited now, in the little Yosemite bathroom that smelled faintly of mint and cold air and panic, while you tried not to come apart.

“Okay,” you said, because apparently your mouth had mistaken itself for a manager. “Coffee?”

Your own stomach responded to the word with a sharp little curl of protest.

You grimaced.

Shane’s eyes tracked that immediately.

“No,” he said.

The answer was so immediate, so flatly certain, that under any other circumstance you might’ve laughed.

He pushed off the doorframe and stepped fully into the room, gaze still on your face, taking inventory the way he always did—color, posture, breathing, whether you were still upright out of choice or stubbornness.

“I think,” he said, voice low and even, “what you’re going to do is have a shower, go lie down, put something mindless on, and stop trying to pretend you’re the foreman of this situation.”

You blinked at him.

He kept going, already planning, already moving pieces into place like a man laying out gear before weather hit.

“I’ll go into town and grab you some things. Crackers, ginger ale, whatever sounds good when I text you. I’ll call Brian and let him know he needs to do some actual work on the dinner menu instead of whatever bullshit he’s currently bringing to the table.”

“I thought I left the kitchen in safe hands,” you muttered, weakly defensive on behalf of your own command structure.

Shane’s mouth twitched.

“Safe-ish,” he allowed. “Contained, maybe. Not unsupervised.”

You wanted to argue. You really did. On principle, if nothing else. You were fully capable of managing your own nausea, your own crisis, your own deeply inconvenient emotional breakdown before breakfast.

But the truth was you were suddenly so tired you could’ve folded in half.

And Shane, the traitor, had already turned toward the shower.

He reached in and turned the water on, checking the temperature with his fingers the way he checked everything—carefully, practically, without fuss. The pipes groaned once before the stream evened out into a steady rush. Steam began to breathe slowly into the room.

You watched him through the mirror.

The quiet competence of him.

The way nothing in his body language was panicked, even though he had every right to be. The way he was handling you like you were something real and fragile and not an unexploded bomb he wanted to push back into the wilderness and hope never found its way home.

When the water had warmed enough, he turned back to you.

“Arms up,” he said.

You stared at him.

His eyebrow climbed.

You obeyed.

He hooked his fingers lightly into the hem of the shirt you were wearing—his shirt, dark blue, hanging off you in wrinkled surrender—and pulled it up over your head in one easy movement. The air hit your skin cool and immediate. You gave him a look the second you was bare from the waist up, because obviously.

He did not look down.

He very specifically did not look down.

Which, honestly, was more offensive than if he had.

You narrowed your eyes.

He kept his face pointed firmly somewhere around your shoulder, jaw set in that suspiciously neutral line he wore when he was behaving on purpose.

You caught the tiny tell, though—the faintest tension at the corner of his mouth, the discipline of a man very consciously not glancing where he absolutely wanted to.

Your eyebrow arched higher.

He felt it, “I can hear you judging me,” he said, dry.

“You should be judged,” you replied. “This is a hostile work environment.”

His eyes flicked to yours then, just yours, and there it was—that small, dangerous warmth that always lived under his restraint now, easy and private and entirely too dear.

“I’ll be back,” he said, and leaned in to press a kiss to your forehead.

It was a soft one. Not hurried. Not absent. The kind that said I know this is hard without the insult of saying it aloud.

Then he stepped back toward the door. “Shower. Bed. I’ll be back soon.”

You moved toward the steam with all the dignity of a damp Victorian ghost. “Yes, sir,” you muttered.

He paused with one hand on the doorframe and looked back at you.

That look.

Half warning, half amusement, all trouble, “Don’t.”

Your mouth twitched despite yourself, “I didn’t do anything,” you said, smiling as you stepped under the water.

It was a lie so obvious it practically glittered.

His gaze dipped—not indecently, just enough to let you know he was, in fact, still a man and still your boyfriend and still very much aware of the fact that you were naked in his bathroom, smiling at him like a menace while he was trying to be responsible.

Then he looked back up at your face and gave you the smallest, most betrayed huff of laughter.

“You know exactly what you’re doing.”

“Do I?”

“Yeah.”

You grinned at him through the steam. “That sounds like a you problem.”

His smirk arrived slow and unwilling, the way it always did when he was fighting one and losing with dignity, “Take the shower, Princess.”

“Oh, now you’re calling me Princess when I’m naked and emotionally compromised?”

“You’re the one who started with yes sir.”

“I was being respectful.”

“You were being a brat.”

The laugh that escaped you this time was real. A little shaky, but real. And that—somehow—that little scrap of ridiculous flirting in the middle of everything made your chest ache almost worse than the nausea had.

Because this was still you.

Still him.

Still the two of you, somehow, even with the world tilting under your feet.

He pointed once at the shower, like you were both a problem and his favorite one. “Five minutes. Then bed.”

“You timing me?”

“I’m considering it.”

“You’re obsessed with me.”

“That’s not the word I’d use.”

Your smile softened before you could stop it.

His did too.

For one second neither of you said anything. Just looked. Steam between you. Morning light catching on the edges of everything. The kind of quiet that didn’t ask for much except honesty.

Then he straightened, like remembering he had to actually leave if he wanted to get anything done, “I’m serious,” he said. “Shower. Bed. Phone on loud.”

“Yes, dear.”

He sighed like a man carrying an impossible burden. “You’re lucky I love you.”

You blinked once.

There it was again—that simple, matter-of-fact way he said it now. No drama. No weight thrown around. Just truth, offered the same way he’d offer you water or a jacket or his hand over rough ground.

Your throat tightened, “You too,” you said, quieter.

His face changed at that. Small. Wrecked around the edges. He covered it with a nod and stepped out, closing the bathroom door most of the way behind him.

You listened to him move through the cabin for a few seconds after that—the soft thud of boots being pulled on, the cupboard door, the rustle of keys, the muted clink of his ranger-issue mug being moved off the counter.

Then the front door opened.

Closed.

And suddenly it was just you.

You stepped fully under the shower and let the hot water hit your shoulders.

It should have helped.

It absolutely didn’t.

The room felt too loud now. Too bright. The water too sharp against your skin. Your stomach twisted again—not enough to send you back over the sink, but enough to keep your body on edge, every nerve waiting for the next wave. You braced your palms against the tile and bowed your head until your forehead rested there, the heat running over the back of your neck and down your spine.

The tile was smooth and cool beneath the steam.

You shut your eyes.

And there it was. Everything.

Not just the nausea, but the fact that you were too much of a coward to tell the man you loved the biggest truth of your life.

You’d told him you felt awful. You’d let him build a plan around symptoms. You’d let him kiss your forehead and tell you to go to bed and text Brian and take charge and do all the things he always did when you were fraying at the edges.

And still you hadn’t said it.

Your mouth opened on a breath that turned into something perilously close to a sob.

“God,” you whispered to the tile.

Coward.

You could fight with him, you could flirt with him, you could climb mountains, rebuild kitchens, confess love, steal shirts, make life plans, sleep in his ridiculous tent and bully him into buying a motel room instead.

But this?

This had reduced you to standing naked in a shower in Yosemite, forehead against the wall, trying not to cry because the truth was too big and too alive and too capable of changing everything.

You loved him.

That was the worst part.

You loved him enough that his reaction mattered more than your own panic.

You loved him enough that the idea of disappointment crossing his face for even a second felt unbearable.

You loved him enough to already be halfway protecting him from news that was as much his as yours.

And underneath all of that, low and glowing and impossible to turn off, was the other truth: some part of you was already protecting this too.

You pressed your head harder to the tile and let the water pour over you while your stomach twisted and your heart made a wreck of itself and the whole morning kept moving forward whether you were ready or not. <><><><><><><><> “Shane said you’re sick.”

Gabe’s voice drifted across the porch with all the casual menace of a man who’d absolutely clocked too much and planned to weaponize it gently.

You looked up from where you were sitting on the back step of the bar, one knee bent, the other stretched out, a sweating glass of water pressed hard against your cheek like cold could fix bad life choices. The porch boards still held some of the day’s warmth, but the evening air coming off the trees had that Yosemite bite to it—pine and damp earth and the faint smoke of someone, somewhere, making fire behave. The fairy lights strung overhead hummed softly, throwing a warm halo over the service path and making everything feel just intimate enough to be dangerous.

Gabe stood there in the doorway for a beat, pink vape in hand, hoodie half-zipped, looking offensively unbothered by existence. He took a long pull, then exhaled a cloud that smelled like spun sugar, processed strawberries, and regret.

Your stomach twisted on instinct.

You made a face and brushed your hand in front of your nose. “I thought you were quitting.”

“I did,” he said, stepping out and dropping down beside you on the step with the long-suffering grace of a man settling in for gossip he had no official right to. “Then I thought about how great I was doing, had one celebratory puff, and now here we are.” He held the vape up between two fingers like evidence in a trial. “I’ve realized there are worse things in life than me vaping—”

“Like what?” you asked, still pressing the glass to your face because if you let it go you might combust.

“Capitalism. Global warming. The housing market.” Gabe ticked them off on his fingers. “Brian shaving his head again.”

You turned your head slowly and looked at him.

He met your stare with complete seriousness.

“Right,” you said after a second, because frankly there was no arguing with that level of confidence.

He nodded once, satisfied, then nudged your shoulder with his.

It wasn’t  a hard nudge; It didn’t need to be.

You winced anyway.

His head turned toward you in one sharp movement. “Okay,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “That got a reaction.” He leaned back slightly to look at your face. “So. Park Narc thinks you’re sick. What’s the problem?”

You kept your gaze on the service alley in front of you. The back path ran down toward the trees in a strip of gravel and shadow, still damp in places from the afternoon rinse. Beyond it, the lodge’s outer lights cut soft rectangles across the ground. Somewhere inside, someone dropped a pan and swore with conviction.

“Just Brian’s cooking,” you muttered.

Gabe made a noise so disbelieving it was almost artistic, “Nah uh.” He shook his head and took another drag. “Brian’s record of food-to-food-poisoning ratio is below average.”

You turned to look at him fully this time. “Should I be concerned that there’s an average? Does Justine know there’s an average?”

“I don’t know,” Gabe said, exhaling another plume of candy-scented poison into the night. “Ever since she went on holiday and met a man called Pedro, she’s had her head in the clouds. Which, frankly, is adorable and makes her less likely to notice when Brian nearly kills a tourist with aioli.”

That got the tiniest corner of your mouth to twitch before your stomach rolled again and reminded you this was not a fun, flirty porch scene in a movie. This was your life. Your very stupid, very loud, very hormonal life.

Gabe clocked it all.

Of course he did. He leaned his elbows on his knees, pink vape dangling from one hand, and looked over at you with the kind of concern he disguised so aggressively it almost passed for sarcasm.

“So,” he said. “Is this like sick sick, or sick sick?”

You blinked at him, “There’s a difference?”

He grinned. “There’s always a difference. I’ll bring out the sliding scale again if I have to.”

You let out a slow breath through your nose. “God, not the sliding scale.”

“Oh, it’s back,” he said. “It’s laminated now.” He held up an invisible chart in the air between you. “Sick is ‘I need soup and a day off.’ Sick sick is ‘I am about to alter the trajectory of my life and also maybe throw up in the fern by the ice machine.’”

That was too close.

You looked down at the glass in your hands. Condensation slicked your fingers. The ice had already started to melt, a quiet little collapse you felt strangely seen by.

“Seriously,” Gabe said, and the grin dropped away enough to show the real thing underneath. “You good?”

You wanted to say no.

No, you were absolutely not good.

You were tired in that deep cellular way that made sitting upright feel like a negotiable act. You were sore. Your back hurt. Your stomach had been turning itself inside out in waves all day—hungry, but also repulsed by food, except for when you were suddenly ravenous for the exact wrong thing at the exact worst time. You were exhausted from not sleeping and from too much sleeping and from the fact that your own brain had apparently become an enemy insurgency.

You had to think about your future.

And Shane’s future.

And your future with Shane.

You had to think about whether he would really move to the city for you and a baby, or whether he was still quietly, stubbornly fixed on not doing that in any permanent sense. Whether he’d sacrifice the mountain one week at a time and call it enough. Whether you’d end up giving up your career to move somewhere in between—some compromise town with one decent grocery store and a lot of emotional resentment—because neither of you could decide who got to keep the version of home that mattered more.

You had to think about apartments and doctors and distance and money and babies and bodies and jobs and time and whether loving someone was enough when geography was a very big very real thing.

You had to think about how Shane had looked at you that morning, all rough sleep and concern, and how he’d touched the back of your neck like he already knew you were balancing on the edge of something enormous.

You had to think about the fact that you still hadn’t told Gabe.

Or Becca.

Or Brian, who would cry and then make it weird and then cry harder.

You had to think about your mother.

Mark.

The kitchen.

Your own body, which no longer felt fully like it belonged to you.

You had to think about all of it at once, all the time, and you were so tired.

Instead, you lowered the glass into your lap and said, with a small, defeated sigh: “I just need another nap.”

Gabe stared at you. Then one eyebrow climbed. Slow. Deliberate. Dangerous.

“A nap,” he repeated.

“Mm-hm.”

“You’ve had, like, four today.”

“I’m committed to the bit.”

He leaned back on his hands and looked out into the dark for a second like he was giving the universe one final chance to make this less obvious. It declined.

When he looked back at you, the expression on his face was annoyingly gentle. “Chef,” he said carefully, “if you tell me you’re dying, I’m gonna be supportive. If you tell me you murdered someone, I’m gonna need details first but I’ll hear you out. If you tell me you’re just tired, after I personally watched you glare at a bread roll for thirty full seconds like it owed you money, I’m calling bullshit.”

You let your head fall back against the porch post with a quiet thunk.

The fairy lights overhead blurred for a second, “Don’t,” you muttered.

“I haven’t done anything.”

“You’re being unusually observant.”

“That’s one of my worst traits.”

Silence stretched between you, but not an empty one. Inside the bar, someone laughed too loudly. A chair scraped. Music bled faintly through the back wall, something bass-heavy. Outside, the mountain held its own quiet around all of it.

Gabe nudged your knee with his, lighter this time. “I’m not gonna push,” he said. “Mostly because you get mean when cornered and I happen to enjoy my face where it is.” A beat. “But, hypothetically, if this is bigger than Brian’s shitty aioli, you don’t have to do the whole thing alone; you have family here.”

Something in your chest tightened so fast it hurt. You swallowed. You loved this stupid asshole.

Looked down at your hands and at the clear glass between them.

At the water you hadn’t actually wanted but kept drinking because doing something felt better than sitting still with your own thoughts.

Your voice came out quiet.

“I know.”

And you did.

That was the worst part.

Because if you said it out loud—if you said the truth, if you took the thing in your chest and turned it into sound—then it would stop being yours alone. It would become real in a whole different way. Bigger. Sharper. Less containable.

Gabe, blessedly, did not fill the silence. He just sat there beside you, blowing smaller, more guilty-looking clouds into the dark like he was trying not to be offensive to your apparently fragile internal ecosystem.

After a minute, he held the vape farther away from you and said, “For the record, if this turns out to be something more serious than food poisoning, I’d like it noted that I was very cool and mature on the porch.”

You let out a tired breath of a laugh.

“No you weren’t.”

“I was porch-perfect,” He grinned.

“You smell like a carnival.” He looked offended. Truly offended, like you’d insulted his lineage and not his vape. “It’s strawberry.”

“It smells awful,” you said flatly.

Gabe pressed a hand to his chest. “Wow.”

“That,” you continued, pointing vaguely at the pink plastic crime in his hand, “is not strawberry. That is artificial strawberry.” You gave the word the same tone you reserved for “frozen hollandaise” and “pre-shredded parmesan.” “That’s what a strawberry would smell like if it had been described over the phone by a man who’d never met one.”

Gabe opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Opened it again, clearly ready to defend his chemical nonsense to the death; then his attention lifted over your shoulder and his face changed all at once.

Not softened. Not quite.

It just slid into that familiar, delighted expression he wore whenever the universe handed him a live episode of your life to narrate.

“Ah,” he said, straightening a little and lifting the vape in salute, “Canyon Casanova.”

You twisted enough to look.

Shane was coming down the gravel path from the lodge, one hand in the pocket of his jacket, the other swinging loose at his side. The outside dark had settled properly now, all cool blues and silvered edges, and he moved through it like he belonged to it in an infuriatingly photogenic way. Gravel crunched under his boots in that even, decided rhythm that your body had learned before your brain got a say. He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps, looked from Gabe to you, and then pointed at you like he was correcting a factual error.

“She does it better,” he said.

You blinked.

Gabe barked a laugh and pointed the vape at you. “See? Finally, a man of culture.”

The romance was not dead in your relationship. It was simply buried under several layers of sarcasm, practical concern, and a mutual need to bully each other for sport. Which was convenient, really, because you were currently sitting on a porch, keeping a pregnancy secret from your boyfriend, and trying very hard not to throw up on his shoes.

Those stupid boots.

Usually, the smell of him hit you like safety—pine, clean sweat, his soap, cold air, sun-warmed fabric, whatever impossible non-cologne cologne he’d been pretending not to wear for a year and a half. Usually it grounded you.

Tonight, the second the mountain air brought him closer, your stomach turned so violently you had to swallow back a gag.

God.

How had you once found outside on him attractive?

You loved him, apparently. Deeply. Idiotically. Enough to have his child, as it turned out. And right now he smelled like wet bark and fresh hell.

He came up the last step and stopped in front of you, eyes going immediately to your face. Not to Gabe. Not to the glass in your hand. To you.

The humor in his mouth faded just slightly.

“You eaten?” he asked.

The question was casual on the surface, but you knew him too well now. It wasn’t a question thrown out into the air. It was a check. Inventory. Data collection disguised as concern.

You opened your mouth.

Gabe beat you to it, “I tried to feed her,” he said, with the solemnity of a man giving a witness statement. “She glared at a bread roll, drank some water, then came out here. Me, being the concerned citizen that I am, followed. You’re welcome.”

Shane looked at him.

“You’re a community idol,” he said, deadpan.

“Finally,” Gabe murmured, basking. “The recognition I deserve.”

You looked between them and felt another small wave of nausea roll through you, less violent this time, but enough to make you sit a little straighter and breathe through your mouth.

Shane noticed that too.

Of course he did.

He always noticed.

His gaze dropped briefly to the untouched water in your hand, then back to your face. “Come on.”

You stood because arguing seemed like work and because if you stayed sitting another minute Gabe was absolutely going to evolve into emotional support stand-up comedy.

“I’m taking my break very personally,” Gabe said as you handed him the glass.

“You’re taking my whole life very personally,” you muttered.

“That’s friendship.”

“That’s surveillance.”

Shane’s hand landed briefly at the small of your back as you stepped past him. Not enough to steer. Just enough to say watch the step without saying it out loud.

You hated how much comfort there was in that.

Gabe watched the two of you go with the expression of a man who was absolutely going to have opinions later and knew better than to voice them while Shane was still in range, “Don’t die,” he called after you.

“Professionally impossible,” you said without turning.

The service path back to the cabin was quiet.

The lodge noise dropped away behind you in layers—the clink of glasses, the faint thud of music, somebody laughing too loudly near the side entrance—until all that was left was the crunch of gravel under your boots and the thin night sounds of Yosemite settling into itself. Pine boughs moved overhead in the breeze with that soft whispering hush that usually calmed you and currently just made everything feel bigger. The air was cold enough to wake your skin up, and still your body felt hot and strange and wrong.

Shane didn’t push.

Didn’t ask again if you’d eaten.

Didn’t fill the silence with one of his low, practical lectures about water and electrolytes and trying not to run yourself into the ground.

He just walked beside you, half a step closer than he needed to.

You could feel him looking over at you every so often, not obviously, just little glances in the dark that caught on your cheek, your posture, the way you kept one arm folded too tightly across your middle. Taking stock. Waiting for you to either speak or break.

Your brain, meanwhile, had completely abandoned dignity and started offering up ways to tell him.

Congratulations, you’ve been promoted.

Surprise, the protective custody unit got bigger.

Brian didn’t poison me, but someone did get me pregnant and frankly I’d like to speak to management.

That one almost made you laugh, except you were too busy trying not to throw up in the shrubbery.

Others were worse.

Blunter, harder.

I’m pregnant.

We need to talk.

Please don’t look at me like that.

You hated every version.

You hated that no arrangement of words seemed right enough for something this enormous. Too flippant and you’d look insane. Too serious and you might start crying before you got through the first syllable.

And sooner or later he was going to realize this wasn’t just Brian’s cooking.

Shane might not do babies, but he did patterns. He did observation. He did noticing when you tied your laces wrong or skipped breakfast or lied about being tired or pretended you weren’t hurt when you absolutely were. He noticed weather shifts and broken latches and the angle of your jaw when you were trying not to say the truth.

The longer you kept this from him, the worse he was going to take it Because he’d be hurt.

Because he’d look at you with those steady eyes and go quiet in that way he did when something mattered, and you would know immediately that waiting had been the wrong choice.

He glanced over again.

You felt it before you saw it.

“Still feel sick?” he asked at last, voice low.

“Yes,” you said, because that was easier than all the other answers stacking up behind your teeth.

He nodded once. “You want tea?”

Tea.

The domesticity of that nearly knocked you sideways.

He was talking about tea and you were carrying his baby and your entire life had become a bad rom-com written by someone who really liked stress.

“Maybe,” you said faintly.

He didn’t comment on your tone. Just adjusted his pace slightly when your steps slowed, as if the dark itself had asked him to.

The cabin came into view through the trees a minute later, porch light glowing soft and yellow against the wood. The small familiar shape of it made something in your chest tighten so hard it hurt. Home, for now. Home with his flannel over the chair and your boots by the door and his mug on the counter and the secret still lodged sharp under your ribs.

Shane went ahead the last two steps to the porch, pulling his keys from his pocket. The metal jangled softly in the night. He unlocked the door with the easy muscle memory of a man who had done this enough times to stop thinking about it.

You stood behind him, staring at the back of his jacket, at the broad line of his shoulders, at the nape of his neck where his hair had gone soft from the evening air.

You could still wait.

You could go inside, drink the tea, sit down, try to find a better moment.

A gentler one.

A smarter one.

Tomorrow morning, maybe. When the world felt less thin-skinned. When you hadn’t spent the evening trying not to vomit because your boyfriend smelled too much like actual wilderness. But then he pushed the door open and stepped inside, and the sight of him crossing the threshold—safe, familiar, his place, your place, the place the truth would have to live in eventually—made your panic spike so hard it overrode every last ounce of strategy.

“I’m pregnant,” you blurted.

He stopped.

Not gradually.

Just stopped dead in the middle of the cabin, one hand still on the edge of the door, body half turned back toward you as if the words had physically reached out and caught him by the chest.

The silence after was instant and absolute.

Your own heartbeat turned deafening.

The cabin suddenly seemed too small, too bright, every object inside it unbearably clear—the chair with his jacket over the back, the half-read field manual on the table, the lamp by the couch, the folded blanket, your water glass from this morning still sitting by the sink.

You had said it.

Oh God.

You had actually said it.

There was no taking it back now. No softer version. No strategic retreat. No joke.

Your stomach dropped so hard you thought for one insane second you might actually pass out and that would be not only humiliating but wildly off-brand.

Shane turned.

Slowly.

His face was unreadable in that first terrible second, not because he didn’t feel anything, but because he felt too much all at once and every part of him had gone still trying to catch up.

Your mouth opened, closed. You had the wild urge to immediately make it worse by talking.

To explain. To apologize. To say I was going to tell you earlier or please say something or I know this is bad timing or I know this is probably not what you wanted.

Nothing came out.

The panic was full-body now, hot and electric and humiliating. It buzzed in your fingers. Sat high in your throat. Made your knees feel weirdly detached from the rest of you.

Because now you had to wait, now you had to see his face change. Now you had to find out what that silence meant. And standing there in the doorway with the night still at your back and the truth hanging between you like a lit fuse, you realized with a horrible, crystal clarity that this was the part you had been afraid of all along:

Mot the pregnancy. Not the nausea. Not even the future.

This.

Chapter 5: Smurfs Smile. “But I was built from special pieces that I learned how to unscrew And I can always reassemble to fit perfectly for you Or anybody that decides that I'm of use…” Lonely Is The Muse- Halsey.

Andrew had never really known safety the way he felt it in that small kitchen that morning.

Not the way normal people meant it—soft, unconscious, something you lived inside without thinking about it. Pope’s version of safe had always been temporary. Conditional. Built out of things you could check and control. Locks. Guns. Plans. Escape routes. The weight of cash in a drawer. The knowledge that if something went wrong, he could make it stop.

Safe was a something he could hold.

Safe was Smurf’s house when Smurf was in a good mood—because her approval meant you weren’t in trouble, and in the Cody world not in trouble was the closest thing to peace you got. Safe was being useful. Being chosen. Being needed. Safe was doing what you were told and not asking questions that made her eyes go cold.

Safe was never kind.

Safe was never warm.

It was just… the moment before the next thing happened.

Even in prison, safe had meant learning the rules fast enough not to get eaten. It had meant keeping your head down, your mouth shut, your back to a wall when you could. Safe was vigilance until it became muscle memory.

So when Pope stepped into your kitchen that morning—shirt on now, hair still damp from a quick rinse—his body braced automatically for the familiar: tension, judgement, performance, a price tag.

But your kitchen didn’t ask anything of him.

It was small. A little cluttered in a way that said life happened here constantly. A drying rack full of mismatched cups. The butter container open on the bench.  A jam jar open, knife sticking out because you’d been interrupted mid-task. A grocery list stuck to the fridge with a magnet—half scribbles, half reminders, all necessity. The table had a scuffed corner like it had been bumped a thousand times. There were childproof latches on the cabinets, and Pope clocked them immediately—his brain couldn’t help it—but the sight didn’t tighten him like it usually did.

It made his chest loosen.

Because those locks weren’t about paranoia or control.

They were about the care of a little boy who would climb the counters to get into them.

Henry was there in tracksuit pants and a jumper, hair sticking up, tyre in his mouth, orbiting the room in quick loops. He wasn’t quiet, but he wasn’t dangerous either—just movement and sound and little happy noises as he hovered near you, drawn by routine like gravity. He was mimicking the same sentence over and over again, gibberish at first, and then what Pope could pick up, “Anyway, lets go.”

You were at the stove, moving with that tired competence Pope had come to recognise. Not pretty domestic, not curated. Real. A woman cracking eggs with one hand while keeping the other half-lifted like a guardrail, ready to block Henry from the stove if he drifted too close. You talked as you cooked—not for Pope, mostly for Henry—narrating the world in calm, predictable pieces.

“Toast first. Butter. Jam. Not on the floor, buddy. Plate. We’re gonna have a good day.”

Henry echoed fragments, satisfied by the structure, “Good day.”

“Good words,” you murmured, voice warm.

Pope stood near the doorway at first, instinctively unwilling to place himself in the middle of someone else’s space. His shoulders stayed tight. His hands stayed loose. His eyes tracked everything—windows, back door, where knives were, where Henry was, where you were, where the street noise would come in.

Then something strange happened.

Nothing happened. No one yelled. No one tested him. No one tried to make him prove himself. No one made a joke at his expense, no one poked at him to see if he’d snap.

The warmth wasn’t just from the stove or the morning sun through the window. It was in the way you moved around Henry without resentment. In the way Henry laughed high pitched after he tried to tickle your side and it turned into more like a sharp pinch and you didn’t flinch. In the way you gave Pope a mug of coffee and didn’t hover for gratitude. You just set it down with a smile like it was normal to offer someone something and not demand a piece of them in return.

It hit Pope like a hand around his ribs.

Warm. Firm.

Breathe.

As if someone had wrapped him up and told his body it could unclench after being suffocated his entire life.

Pope didn’t know what to do with it, he kept expecting the hook.

The Cody house taught you that warmth always came with a price. Smurf’s affection was never free. Even tenderness in that place was transactional—earned and revoked however she seemed fit. But here, the only price was… being present; and Pope realised, with a sharp little jolt, that this was what he’d been starving for without knowing it.

Not comfort. Not romance.

Normal.A sink full of dishes. A kid who threw toast twice before finally eating it. A woman who rolled her eyes at the universe and still made breakfast anyway. A house where the locks existed because someone loved someone enough to prevent disaster—not because someone wanted to keep you trapped.

Pope’s version of safety had always been built to keep violence out.

This safety wasn’t built against violence.

It was built despite it.

Despite overdue bills and sleep debt and the way your ex had shown up at 7:32am with entitlement and anger. Despite the world being heavy and unfair and constantly asking for more than you had to give. You still buttered toast. You still narrated the morning like you were laying down something for Henry to follow. You still found a laugh—even if it came out tired, even if it was the kind of laugh that was more breath than sound.

Pope stood near the edge of your kitchen like he didn’t trust himself to take up too much space; but his body still held that early-morning tension like it hadn’t realised it was allowed to stand down yet. His eyes were doing what they always did: tracking, counting, checking.

But the things he was checking here weren’t threats.

They were… life.

The countertop clutter: A pile of letters near the fruit bowl—some unopened, some opened and stacked neatly as if neatness could make the numbers less real. A school note. A therapy appointment card. A folded grocery list with bread and juice added in messy scrawl.

Pope’s gaze caught that list and he felt that familiar squeeze—late fees, overdue notices, the quiet violence of money. He didn’t say anything. He just filed it away like he had found himself doing to all of the other small things in your life lately.

Henry wandered over to the table and climbed up with the confidence of a kid who believed the world would catch him. His feet slid a little on the chair seat. He steadied himself with one sticky hand and left a smear of jam on the tabletop like proof of his existence.

You didn’t scold. You didn’t snap; You just reached for a wet wipe—already on the counter, already prepared, because you lived in preparation—and said, “Hands,” like it was routine.

Henry offered his hands immediately, palms out like a tiny presentation.

You took them gently and wiped—firm, careful, practiced. Your fingers moved over his knuckles and the undersides of his nails like you were cleaning away more than sugar.

Henry watched you while you did it, eyes bright, chewing slow on his tyre, “Clean,” he said, and his whole face lit up with pride.

“Clean,” you echoed simply, like the word mattered, like the concept mattered.

Henry grinned wider, satisfied, and immediately pressed his now-clean hands flat on the table again just to feel the surface, as if testing whether clean changed anything.

You turned back to the stove, spatula in hand, eggs hissing quietly in the pan. Pope watched the line of your shoulders as you moved—still tired, still tense, but steady. Capable. The kind of capable that wasn’t loud. The kind that didn’t need an audience.

Then you glanced at Pope, and there it was again—that automatic, apologetic politeness like you were bracing for judgement just because your house was lived-in.

“Sorry,” you started, “it’s not usually this chaotic—”You paused, eyes drifting toward Henry, then back to the pan, like you heard your own lie before it fully formed. Then you let out a small huff and corrected yourself with that deadpan honesty Pope was starting to recognise as your version of bravery, “Actually, that’s a lie,” you said simply. “It is always this chaotic.”

Your mouth twitched, like you were sharing a joke at your own expense, “Usually it’s worse,” you added, flipping eggs with practiced precision, “but he’s being suspiciously well behaved this morning.”

Henry, as if to prove you wrong, made a delighted little sound and started tapping his clean hands on the table in a quick rhythm—tap tap tap—while humming under his breath.

Pope’s mouth twitched again. Because you were standing there in the middle of a morning that should’ve crushed you—overdue bills and broken sleep and a man at your door—and you still found space to joke.

Pope looked at Henry—happy, humming, alive—and then back at you, and the thought landed in his chest with a steady weight:

This is what safety looks like when it’s made out of love instead of fear.

And Pope didn’t know how to live inside it; But for the first time in his life, he wanted to try. Not in the big, dramatic way—Pope wasn’t built for vows or speeches or promises that sounded pretty. He wanted to try in the only way his body understood: show up again tomorrow.

He stood in your kitchen with a mug of coffee he’d now picked up like it was a normal thing to do—dark, too strong, the kind he liked. The ceramic was warm against his palm. The house smelled like eggs and toast and the cheap strawberry jam Henry insisted on. It was so ordinary it made Pope’s ribs ache.

Henry sat on the table swinging his legs, tyre in his mouth, humming to himself as he watched you move between stove and counter.

Pope took a long sip of coffee, eyes tracking automatically—Henry’s hands, the chair, the edge of the table, the front door locks even from here. Habit. Safety. Then, because his brain wouldn’t let it go, because the image of that maroon-shirted man’s boot in your doorframe kept replaying like a threat loop, Pope asked the question that had been sitting in his throat since he’d stepped off his grass:

“Does your ex-husband knock on your door like that often?”

His voice was low. Flat. Like he didn’t care. But he did.

You froze for half a second—barely noticeable—then resumed spreading butter on Henry’s toast like the act required your full attention. Like looking at Pope while answering would make it too real. You hesitated.

Pope watched the pause with the same focus he once watched a bank teller when he couldn’t decide whether she had pressed the alarm or not.

“Well… not really,” you said finally, careful. “But I haven’t been answering his messages. Or his calls.” Your mouth twisted, then you added, quieter, “Or his lawyer’s letters.” You looked away toward the sink—toward the dishes, toward the window, anywhere but Pope’s eyes. Like you were bracing for judgement. Like you expected him to think you were stupid for ignoring legal letters, when really you just sounded tired. Like the words lawyer and custody and papers had become a kind of noise you couldn’t bear hearing anymore.

Pope didn’t say anything. He waited.

You exhaled through your nose, shoulders lifting slightly. “He keeps talking about custody,” you continued, voice flattening into something exhausted. “Says he’ll sign the papers once I agree to… twenty/eighty.”

Pope’s jaw tightened.

Twenty/eighty.

Custody as a bargain chip. Divorce papers used like a leash. Smurf would’ve respected the strategy in a sick way. Pope just felt his stomach turn.

You shrugged like you were trying to make it sound casual, like it wasn’t a knife in your ribs. “But—” you said, offhand, “he can’t cope with Henry,” You glanced at Henry as if to make sure he hadn’t heard. Henry was humming, blissfully unconcerned, fingers tapping the table in a little rhythm while he waited for the toast. “I’m not saying that to sound like an asshole,” you added quickly, apologetic already. Like you were used to smoothing everything down. “It’s just—he spent one weekend alone with Henry when we were still married.” You laughed once, short and humourless. “I had a work thing.”

Your hands moved faster with the toast, as if speed could outrun the memory.

“And by the end of the first night,” you continued, voice tight, “he was calling me asking me to come home because Henry had another meltdown and he was stressed.” You paused, swallowing. “Like—stressed because… parenting was hard? For one night?”

Your mouth pressed into a line, the anger flashing and then being smothered immediately.

You stopped for a long moment, staring down at the plate like it might tell you what to do next, “Anyway—” you tried, the word coming out like a door you were trying to shut.

Pope saw it. That pattern.

You opened up, then you flinched from your own honesty and tried to take it back. You apologised without saying “sorry,” the apology baked into the way you swallowed words and redirected them into jokes.

Like you’d been taught your whole life to shrink. To make yourself palatable. To make sure your anger didn’t make you difficult. To make sure your pain didn’t make you dramatic. To make sure your needs didn’t take up too much oxygen.

And Pope—who knew what it was to be moulded by a mother’s hands into whatever she wanted—felt something hit him hard in the gut.

A punch of recognition.

He wanted to tell you you were allowed.

Allowed to take up space. Allowed to say he scares me without adding a joke. Allowed to be angry at a man who couldn’t keep you in a marriage so he was trying to keep you in every other way. Allowed to ignore his letters if reading them felt like swallowing glass.

Pope wanted to say it out loud. Wanted to put it in simple words, the way you spoke to Henry—clear, steady, no judgement.

But Pope didn’t have the language for tenderness. Not cleanly.

What he did have was anger.

It coiled under his skin as he listened to you talk, hot and tight, turning his muscles into wire. Anger that told him to find the man again—follow him to his car, follow him to wherever he lived, learn his routines the way Pope learned perimeters.

Anger that said: He doesn’t get to treat her like property.

Anger that said: Henry is not a bargaining piece.

Pope took another sip of coffee, slower this time, because if he didn’t anchor himself in something mundane he’d stand up and go do something irreversible.

Still on the table, Henry made a happy little noise and reached for the toast when you set it down. He smeared jam with the back of his finger like a tiny menace, then licked his finger and giggled at himself.

You watched him with that soft, tired love again, like it was the only thing keeping you upright.

Pope’s eyes lingered on your face. The shadows. The stubbornness. The way you were holding it together.

He cleared his throat, the sound rough; “He’s using the papers,” Pope said quietly.

It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t advice. It was just… naming it. Pulling the thing out of the dark so it couldn’t pretend it was normal.

You looked up at him, startled. Like you hadn’t expected him to understand the game.

Pope’s gaze flicked to Henry, then back to you, “He’s not here for custody,” Pope added, voice low. “He’s here to keep you… stuck.”

The word came out harsh because Pope hated it.

He hated men who needed control to feel big. Hated the kind of coercion that didn’t leave bruises but left you exhausted anyway. Smurf did that kind of violence every day—paperwork violence, money violence, emotional violence.

Pope recognised it instantly.

Your throat worked as you swallowed. You didn’t deny it.

You just looked tired, “I know,” you whispered, and it sounded like admitting defeat.

Pope felt that anger twist again, but underneath it was something else—something steadier, something that scared him more because it wasn’t violent.

It was protective.

The kind that wanted to stand beside you, not over you. The kind that wanted to make your kitchen feel safe again, even with overdue bills on the counter and the memory of boots in your doorway.

Pope’s hand tightened around the mug, “If he comes back,” he reminded you, voice still calm, still low, “you don’t open it.”

You let out a small laugh that wasn’t humour. “I said that, too, once.”

Pope’s eyes didn’t leave yours. “Yeah,” he said. “And then you got tired.”

It wasn’t judgement. It was recognition.

He watched your face shift—anger flaring first, bright and sharp like a match strike… then shame trying to swallow it whole, smothering it down into something quieter. Something you could carry without anyone calling you dramatic.

Pope hated that shame.

Not in an abstract way. In a physical way. Like it scraped the inside of his ribs. Because shame was a tool. Smurf used it like a knife. Pope recognised it instantly when he saw it on other people—especially on you—because he’d spent half his life choking on it.

He didn’t know how to take it away, he didn’t have the right words. He wasn’t built for gentle reassurance. He’d never learned how to sit inside someone else’s pain without trying to control it, fix it, shut it down.

So he offered the only thing he could: “I’m here,” Pope said simply.

Two words that didn’t sound like much.

But in Pope’s mouth, it was a promise. Not a pretty promise. Not a movie one. A perimeter promise. A show up promise. The kind he could actually keep.

You stared at him for a long moment like you didn’t know what to do with that. Like you were waiting for the hook. Like you were bracing for him to take it back and laugh and call you stupid for needing anyone.

Instead, Pope just stood there with the coffee mug in his hand, eyes steady.

And then you broke.

Not loudly. Not in a way meant to make anyone feel guilty. You broke the way exhausted people broke—quietly, all at once, like a seam giving out.

“I’m not…” you started, and your voice wobbled. You swallowed and tried again. “You don’t need to.”

Your hands fluttered uselessly near the counter like you didn’t know where to put them. Like your body wanted to fold in on itself but you refused. Like you were trying to keep your spine.

“I’m—I’m a big girl,” you said, and Pope saw how hard you worked to make it sound like a joke. “I—I knew what he was like.” Your laugh was thin. “Well, more like I was warned what he was like and I didn’t listen.”

You took a breath that shook, “And now I’m stuck in a town where I don’t know anyone, with my ex banging on my door, and bills up to my eyeballs, and I can barely work because of Henry and—and my family is across the other side of the country, and I just—” Your voice broke on the last word like it physically couldn’t carry any more weight.

Your eyes watered. You looked down fast, blinking hard like you could deny tears by refusing to look at anyone while they existed, “Sorry,” you whispered.

Pope felt it like a punch.

Not the tears. The sorry.

You apologised like breathing. Like taking up space required permission. Something inside him snapped—not violent, not loud, but sudden and absolute; “Stop saying sorry,” Pope said, too fast, too sharp.

Your head lifted, startled.

Pope’s jaw flexed, then he forced his voice lower, steadier, because he didn’t want to scare you. He just… couldn’t stand the idea of you swallowing yourself down to make the world more comfortable; “You have nothing to be sorry about,” he said, blunt as truth.

He meant it with his whole body. He meant it like a rule.

And it wasn’t just about this moment. It was about every time he’d heard you say sorry over the months for things you didn’t need to apologise for—Henry stimming, Henry making noise, your yard being messy, your life being hard.

Pope didn’t know how to say you’re allowed without it sounding like he was giving you permission.

But he wanted to. God, he wanted to. Because watching you apologise for surviving made something ugly coil in his gut.

It wasn’t just anger. It was… attachment.

And that scared him because it felt different than Amy.

With Amy, it had been this careful, awkward reaching toward normal. Church air and polite smiles and the idea that if he did the right things—showed up, sat still, tried—he could become a version of himself that wasn’t soaked in blood. Amy had felt like a door to another life. A life where Pope could pretend the Cody darkness was something he could leave at the curb like shoes.

But it had always been fragile. Like glass. Like one wrong truth would crack it.

And it did because Amy had wanted him to be safe in a way that required him to become someone else. She’d looked at him like he was a damaged thing she could soften. Like love was supposed to wash him clean.

Pope didn’t blame her for leaving. He understood it. Love didn’t survive the Cody world. It got eaten.

But you… you weren’t asking him to be clean.

You weren’t romanticising him, either.

You suspected his mother was dangerous. You didn’t pretend Smurf’s smile was harmless. You didn’t look at Pope like he was a project. You looked at him like he was a man standing in your kitchen, offering help, and you didn’t make him pay for it with pity.

With you, the pull wasn’t about becoming normal, it was about being real.

Standing in the mess. Standing in the hard. Standing in the part of life that didn’t get pretty endings… and staying anyway. That kind of closeness terrified him more than church ever did.

Because it wasn’t a fantasy.

It was something he could actually lose.

You opened your mouth to say something—probably another apology—when Henry came barreling into the kitchen like a small storm.

“T-Rex,” he announced, urgent, grabbing your hand and tugging hard toward the hallway. “T-rex. T-rex.”

Your entire body shifted instantly—tears contained, pain locked away—because Henry needed you and you always answered; “No, baby, not yet.” You tried to keep your voice warm even as he pulled. “Mama’s cooking.”

Henry tugged harder, frustration building in his posture, feet stamping once. “T-rex.”

Pope watched the way your arm tensed under Henry’s grip, watched you try to negotiate calmly while your eyes still shone with unshed tears.

Something in Pope’s chest tightened.

He didn’t like seeing you stretched thin.

He didn’t like watching you carry everything alone.

Pope set his coffee down on the counter carefully, like he didn’t trust his hands to be casual; “T-Rex?” Pope asked Henry, voice low, curious rather than commanding.

Henry stopped tugging your arm for a beat and looked up at Pope like he’d just noticed him properly. His eyes flicked over Pope’s face, then down to Pope’s hands, then back up again.

Then, without hesitation, Henry released you and walked over to Pope and grabbed Pope’s hand, “T-Rex,” Henry said again, as if this explained everything.

And then he started pulling Pope toward the hallway like Pope was furniture he’d decided belonged in another room. Pope let himself be pulled, he didn’t even think about it.

You blinked, surprised by how easily Henry accepted him, by how willingly Pope went.

“He—um,” you said quickly, wiping at your cheek with the back of your hand like you hadn’t just almost cried. “He has a puzzle. He must have lost a piece.” You pointed down the hall. “I’ll grab it.”

Pope didn’t look back at you as he spoke—because if he looked at you, he’d see the wet shine in your eyes again and it would wreck him, “I can do it,” Pope offered instead.

Simple. Practical. Safe.

Henry tugged his hand again. “T-rex.”

Pope followed.

Your voice came out smaller than before, and Pope heard how close you still were to breaking, “Thank you.”

It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t dramatic, but it landed in Pope’s chest like weight.

And as he let Henry drag him down the hall toward whatever T-Rex crisis awaited, Pope realised something with a quiet, startling clarity:

He didn’t just want you to be okay because it was the right thing.

He wanted you to be okay because he cared. And Henry’s small hand in his was warm, insistent, trusting—as if Henry had decided Pope belonged in their orbit now.

Pope didn’t know if he deserved that; But he followed anyway. <><><><> Smurf was waiting for him when he got home.

Not in the kitchen with a cigarette and a casual comment. Not in the backyard pretending to tan. Waiting the way she waited when she wanted something—still, centered, set up like a trap you stepped into the moment you walked through the door.

She was sitting in the living room with her legs crossed, posture relaxed like she hadn’t been watching the clock. Like she hadn’t been listening for the sound of the gate. Like she hadn’t placed herself right in the middle of the house where no one could avoid her without making a statement.

The house was quiet in that bone-deep way it got when the boys were gone or asleep. No Craig laughing at his own jokes. No Deran’s footsteps pacing. No J’s quiet presence moving like a shadow. Just the low hum of the fridge, the soft tick of a wall clock, and Smurf’s perfume sitting in the air like it owned the oxygen.

Her smile was there, bright and practiced.

But it wasn’t a smile.

Smurf didn’t smile. Not really.

Smurf showed teeth.

“Did you have a nice morning?” she asked brightly.

Pope stopped just inside the doorway, keys still in his hand, shirt still smelling faintly of your kitchen—coffee, toast, soap. Ordinary smells that didn’t belong on him. For a second he had the stupid, irrational thought that Smurf could smell it too. That she could smell warmth on him like smoke.

He considered turning around.

He almost did.

He almost ignored her and walked away because he had a feeling—cold, familiar—about what was about to happen. He could feel it in the way the room was arranged, in the way Smurf’s voice held that light tone that meant she’d already sharpened the knife.

But Smurf had perfected making him freeze without raising her voice.

Pope didn’t answer. He didn’t give her the satisfaction of a reaction.

Smurf’s smile widened anyway, because she didn’t need permission to continue.

“Did you have a nice morning,” she repeated, voice sweetening, “playing family with the neighbour?”

The words landed like a slap dressed up as a joke.

Family.

Smurf said it like it was filthy. Like it was pretend. Like Pope had been caught doing something pathetic.

Pope’s jaw tightened. He set his keys down too carefully on the counter, the clink too loud in the silence. His shoulders were stiff, but his face stayed blank. He’d learned that blank was safer—blank gave her less to grab.

Smurf stood slowly, unhurried, as if she had all the time in the world to take him apart. She moved closer with that soft, confident glide, like a woman crossing her own house. Like a queen approaching her loyal dog.

“You think I didn’t notice?” she said, still bright. Still casual. “All those little chats at the fence. You fixing things for her. Watching the kid like he’s—what—your responsibility?”

Pope’s throat worked once.

It wasn’t responsibility.

It was… instinct. It was the way his eyes moved automatically to weak points. Gates. Streets. Water. The way his body reacted before his brain finished the thought.

It was the way Henry’s laughter had done something to him he didn’t understand.

It was the way your voice had sounded when you said I’m not great at having people in my space and Pope had felt like he understood it in his bones.

Smurf stepped closer until she was in his space. Not touching him yet. She didn’t need to touch to control. She could control with proximity alone, with tone alone, with the history between them alone.

Her smile softened. Her eyes didn’t.

“Andrew,” she said, like she was being gentle. Like she was being reasonable. “Do you really think someone like her is going to what?”

A pause. A tilt of her head. The question sharpening.

“Choose you?”

Pope didn’t move. But something inside him flinched.

Smurf’s gaze slid over his face like she was searching for a crack, “Save you?” she added, voice even lighter, as if the idea was funny. “Honey… you can’t run from who you are.”

There it was.

The hook.

Not an argument. Not a threat.

An identity.

Smurf always did that—reminded him who he was until it felt impossible to be anything else.

Pope felt his hands curl into fists at his sides, nails pressing crescents into his palms. He forced them open again. Forced his breathing slow.

Smurf took another step, close enough that Pope could smell her perfume properly, sharp and expensive, “She knows rumours,” Smurf continued, voice turning almost tender, “but she doesn’t know you.”

Pope’s stomach tightened.

Because you didn’t know him, not really.

You knew the neighbour-version. The man who fixed fences. The man who stood between a kid and water. The man who spoke quietly and didn’t judge you for the chaos in your home.

You didn’t know the version Smurf kept on a leash.

The one who had done what he was told. The one whose hands had done things that couldn’t be undone.

Smurf watched the thought land. She always knew when something hit; =

Her smile sharpened again, “What do you think would happen,” she asked, “if she saw who you were?”

Pope’s jaw ticked. Once. Twice.

Smurf leaned in just slightly, voice dropping, not loud but heavier—like she was speaking truth into him.

“You think she’s going to let you around sweet little Henry then?” Smurf murmured. “You think she’s going to invite you in for breakfast if she knows what you’ve done?”

The living room felt smaller. The air felt thicker. Pope felt the walls of his own skin like a cage.

Smurf didn’t have to list it. She didn’t have to say names. She didn’t have to remind him with specifics. The worst parts of Pope’s life lived in him already, sharp and permanent. Smurf only had to touch the bruise and he’d feel the whole injury.

And she did. Over and over.

“Look at you,” she said softly, and it sounded like affection until you heard the contempt under it. “Standing in some little kitchen like you belong there.”

Pope’s chest tightened, hot and sick.

He thought of you buttering toast while keeping your body between Henry and the stove. Thought of Henry’s small hand grabbing his and pulling him down the hall like it made sense. Thought of the way you’d looked at Pope like he wasn’t a threat.

Like he was safe. He thought of the way he watched Henry put together his dinosaur puzzle while you both ate breakfast and called yourself overdramatic before switching to a story involving you, an aeroplane and your fear of heights. He thought of the way he realised how easily he could breathe around you, around your son, around your chaos.

Smurf’s voice cut through it.

“You don’t get to be safe,” she said, not unkindly. Like it was just fact. “People like you don’t get happy little families.”

Pope’s eyes snapped to hers then, and something feral flashed in him—anger, humiliation, a deep, ugly refusal.

Smurf smiled wider, pleased she’d found the nerve.

“You think you can keep that part of you hidden forever?” she asked. “You think you can wear your nice neighbour face and no one will notice what’s underneath?”

Pope’s throat burned.

Because part of him—stupid, dangerous—wanted to say she already notices me. Wanted to say she sees me, even if she didn’t know everything.

But Smurf had raised him. Smurf had trained him.

And she knew exactly how to make hope feel like a liability.

Pope forced his voice out, low and flat, “Leave her out of it.”

Smurf blinked—slowly—like she was amused by his attempt at a boundary, “Oh, Andrew,” she sighed. “I’m already in it.”

She took a step back, smoothing invisible wrinkles from her shirt like this was all casual. Like she hadn’t just reached inside him and twisted; “Just remember,” she said lightly, smile back in place, “when she finds out—when she gets scared—she’ll run.”

Smurf’s eyes held his for a beat, gleaming, “And you’ll come back here,” she finished, sweet as poison. “Where you belong.”

Pope stood there in the quiet after she walked away, chest tight, fists opening and closing like his body didn’t know what to do with the feeling.

Because the worst part was: Smurf wasn’t wrong about the world.

She was just wrong about what Pope wanted.

He didn’t want you to save him.

He didn’t want to be forgiven.

He just wanted—once, for a few minutes in a small kitchen— to breathe like he wasn’t suffocating.