Page 209 of Dark King Daddy

“I don’t want to get attached too quickly.”

I put her tea in front of her and sat down.

“Sunday,” she said.

“Sunday.”

Our check-in. We had kept it through the first weeks after the kidnapping, when some evenings she wanted to talk and others she only wanted me beside her. We had kept it when work ran late, when we were tired, when everything was going well and it would have been easy to decide we didn’t need it.

The original four-week agreement was in a drawer upstairs. We had renewed it together, changed things, kept talking. I still liked knowing there was time set aside when neither of us had to guess.

“Anything you want?” I asked.

“Tuesday evenings.”

“What happens on Tuesday evenings?”

She touched the sketchbook.

“This. You come into the studio. We draw. No work calls for an hour.”

I looked at the book.

“You’re assuming I’ll improve.”

“I’m assuming I’ll like sitting with you.”

I reached across the table and took her hand.

“Tuesday evenings,” I said.

“And I like how things are with us. The Daddy things.” She smiled. “I like that I can ask. I like that you notice when I need looking after, and you listen when I tell you what that means.”

“Even when it means standing on furniture?”

“That was professional development.”

I laughed, and she turned her hand beneath mine, linking our fingers.

“What about you?”

I watched her for a moment. The loose hair around her face. The blanket slipping off one shoulder. My wife, asking what I wanted as though the answer belonged entirely to me.

“When my father died, I thought I knew what the rest of my life would look like.”

She waited.

“His desk. His decisions. Getting older in that room.”

“You’ve changed the chairs.”

I smiled.

“I have.”

“It’s a start.”

“It is.” I ran my thumb over her fingers. “Today, I left because I wanted to see a building with you. My brother handled things. Nothing collapsed.”