My mother looked from me, to Victor, to my bag in Victor's hand, and back to me. For a long moment her mouth worked without sound. Then she cleared her throat, and the smile she'd been restraining escaped out one side.
"Well. Since you're home safe—" she stepped past us both into the elevator, "—I'll head back to my place. Sweetpea's asleep."
And before I could produce a single syllable, she reached out and shoved the two of us backward out of the elevator like sweeping a porch, and the doors slid shut on her grin.
The hallway was silent. Then a low laugh broke it — his.
"What's funny?" I demanded.
Victor shook his head, all innocence, and followed me to my door.
Inside, he stood in the middle of my living room taking it in with the stillness of a man cataloguing evidence. The white curtains. The pink flowers on the table. The half-built block airplane on the side shelf, frozen mid-construction at wing number eleven. His eyes stopped there, and his fingertips moved, very slightly, like a man itching for parts.
"No guest rooms in this apartment," I announced from the kitchen. "You get the sofa."
"Fine," he said, agreeable as anything, and settled onto it like he was claiming a throne.
I got him a bottle of ice water, put it in his hand without ceremony, and went to bed, and did not think about him at all. Not once. (Several times.)
The sofa, by all reports, was comfortable. Sleep did not come easy to him anyway. He lay with one arm bent behind his head, staring at the ceiling, running three years of arithmetic that never balanced.
Then: sound from the bedroom corridor. The door there opened — with effort, the particular grunt-and-shove of a very small person operating very large hardware — and a tiny figure appeared in the gap.
Charlotte stood in the doorway rubbing both eyes with her fists, hair like a startled dandelion, pajamas buttoned wrong.
She dropped her hands, blinked, and found him.
"Hm?" she said.
Man and pup stared at each other across the lamplit room. Victor sat up so fast the water bottle tipped. He got half a step toward her — and stopped dead, hands half-raised, a three-hundred-pound predator experiencing total system failure.
"Uncle..." the little girl said, tilting her head. And then she came pattering across the floor at speed, planted herself in front of him, looked up, and her face lit like a runway at dusk.
"Are you the uncle, or are you my daddy? Why are you in me and Mommy's house?"
The questions came in an unbroken stream, delivered with the confidence of a press briefing. Victor went very still. Then he lowered himself down to one knee, until they were eye to eye, and his voice came out gentler than anything I'd ever heard from a cockpit.
"Can I know your name?"
His hand lifted toward her head — and hung there, frozen, afraid. Charlotte examined the hovering hand, eyes flicking from it to his face. Then, with the diplomacy of a seasoned ambassador, she leaned forward and pushed her whole head into his palm.
"Uncle... Daddy. Did you want to pat my head? You can pat it! One time!"
She rubbed against his hand like a kitten claiming ownership. Something in Victor's face came apart and reassembled itself into a smile, and when he spoke his voice had gone to pieces at the edges.
"Charlotte. That's a lovely name."
"Shh!" A small finger pressed against his lips, gravely. "Quiet, Mommy's sleeping. We can't wake her up." She checked over her shoulder at the corridor to confirm the security situation. Then she turned back. "Uncle, can I have some water? I'm thirsty."
"Of course." He stood and held out both arms. "May I carry you?"
She nodded so hard she wobbled, and stepped straight off the edge of the world into his chest.
One minute later he was carrying her one-handed through the half-dark, one warm floor lamp glowing, and if he had not already lost his heart — well. The match had been lit at the airport, in a parking lot, three days ago. This was the wildfire.
Back on the sofa, she sat in the circle of his arm drinking her water, and the lamp laid its soft gold across two faces that were, character for character, the same face at two different scales.
"Finished," Charlotte announced at last, holding up the cup like a verdict. He took it, set it on the table, and turned to her with his half-solemn, half-teasing grown-up face, the face adults use for Important Lessons.
"Charlotte. Next time you see an uncle you don't know at home, you have to call Mommy right away. Promise me."
He reached over to ruffle her hair. Charlotte recoiled, chin up, deeply affronted.
"But I DO know you!" she said, in the tone reserved for adults being deliberately obtuse.
Victor froze. Something crossed his eyes — hope arriving faster than his ability to ration it.
"You... know me?"
"Yup!" she said. "You're in Mommy's phone."
The world went quiet. He sat there while three years of grief rearranged themselves behind his sternum — because somewhere in a locked phone, in a locked life, she had kept him. Photographs of him, in her phone, in reach of the pup. His throat moved. When he finally smiled, it was the smile of a man finding something he'd been told was lost with all hands.
"Uncle," Charlotte whispered then, leaning close, all conspiracy, "Mommy says my papa flies in the sky. You fly the big plane too, right? Have you seen my papa up there?"
A beat. Her lower lip started to go.
"Does Papa not want me...?"
Victor's heart visibly broke and re-armored in the same second. He pulled her into his chest and wrapped around her, one big hand splayed across her whole back.
"Hey. No. Listen to me, little one." His voice was rough and steady, the voice that talked forty wolves through a lightning cell. "Your papa has never once — not for one single day — stopped wanting you. He thinks about you every time he's in the sky. I promise you that."
The hug was too warm, and too safe, and exactly the right pressure. Charlotte's chin wobbled, and she cried a little, quietly, the way she'd been doing it in her sleep for a year — and Victor panicked magnificently, patting her back in a rhythm that kept losing the beat, kissing the top of her head. "Don't cry. Please don't cry, sweetheart. Shh."
Eventually the storm passed. Charlotte wiggled out of his arms, slid off the sofa on hands and knees, scrubbed her eyes with small fists, and yawned a yolk-wide yawn.
"Uncle, I'm sleepy. I'm going back to sleep next to Mommy now."
He walked her to the bedroom door and stopped at the threshold, crouching down to her level, voice down to a thread of air: "Slowly, and don't wake your mommy. Straight into bed, little one." He patted her head once, softly.
Charlotte nodded. Then, at the door, she spun back and pulled his sleeve down to her mouth, and whispered her real question — the one she'd actually come out of bed for:
"Uncle. When I wake up tomorrow... will you be gone?"
Victor didn't hesitate. Not for a breath.
"No. I won't be gone."
She studied his face for lies, found none, and padded into the dark. He eased the door shut until only a finger's width of light remained, and stood there a long moment with his palm flat against the wood.
Then he went back to the living room, looked at the half-built airplane for a while — and sat down on the floor beside the shelf, and started sorting blocks.
Morning came up gold through the curtains. I surfaced late, wine-heavy, with Charlotte still asleep beside me, and then sat bolt upright as last night returned in full.
Victor. Sofa. Daughter asleep down the hall.
I was up and out the door within a minute, hair like a crime scene, ready to smuggle a grown Alpha out of my apartment before the pup woke — and the living room was empty.
"He's already gone?" I whispered.
"Mommy..."
Behind me, small and sleep-scruffy, Charlotte appeared in the corridor, rubbing one eye. I turned, guilt at maximum.
"Awake, sweetheart?"
I crossed to scoop her up, but her gaze had already snagged on the corner of the room, and her whole face broke open. She pointed, hopped down, and tore across the floor.
"Mommy, LOOK!"
There, on the shelf, stood an airplane built of blocks — wings level, engines even, nearly as tall as she was, every last piece clicked home in the night.
"The plane is FINISHED!" Charlotte screamed, jumping in place like a small seismic event. "We can fly it to see Papa!"
I stood there staring at it. Then at my daughter, laughing. Then at the sofa, where a folded blanket sat with corners squared like a military bed.
...He finished it, I thought. All through the night, on the floor, in the dark — he finished it.
I looked at my laughing little girl, and my mouth curved before I'd authorized it.