Page 76 of Joker

I lift my head slowly. “You’re real brave for a man in neck-breaking range.”

He grins. “Worth it.” Then he keeps moving because even Blaze knows when a room is not for him.

Lexi hands me a different crayon. “You do the fire now.”

I take it because apparently this is my life.

By the time I finally get up off the floor, my knees are stiff, my dignity is in shreds, and I’ve somehow ended up with a folded drawing shoved into my hand because Lexi decided I was “helping so it yours too.”

The paper is warm from her fingers. The dinosaur still looks fake. I tuck it into the inside pocket of my cut anyway. That should probably tell me something too.

Later, the thing that really gets under my skin happens in the hallway.

Raven is talking to Emma outside one of the downstairs rooms, something low and practical about bath time and extra towels, and Lexi is walking beside me on the way back from the kitchen with Bunny in one hand and a cookie she somehow talked Mac into giving her in the other. I have no idea how I ended up escorting a tiny child down the hall like I’m on security detail for the world’s smallest, sleepiest criminal.

Actually, that’s not true.

I know exactly how it happened. She asked if I was going that way, and instead of saying no like a sane man, I changed direction.

Again. Problem.

We’re almost to Raven when Lexi stumbles slightly on the runner rug. It’s nothing. Barely even counts. Just a little hitch in her step because the cookie is more important to her than paying attention to where she’s walking.

Before I can react, she reaches out and catches my finger.

Not my hand. Not even my palm. Just one finger. Tiny fist wrapping around it automatically, like she didn’t think about it at all. Like she just assumed it would be there.

The world goes strangely quiet for half a second.

My stride shortens without conscious thought so I don’t pull away too fast or make her have to let go.

Lexi keeps walking, perfectly content, still chewing her cookie, Bunny dragging against her leg, my finger held in that tiny warm grip like I’m an extension of her route from one room to the next.

It should be nothing. It is absolutely not nothing. Because in one stupid, tiny, ordinary gesture, she hands me more trust than most adults manage in a year.

And it brushes right up against a scar I don’t like touching.

My sister used to hold my hand like that. Not when I was old enough to be embarrassed by it. Before that. Before everything went sideways. Before red lights in the rain and screaming metal and the kind of silence that follows something breaking too hard to be fixed.

The memory doesn’t hit cleanly. It never does. It comes in flashes. Not enough to relive it. Just enough to remind me the wound is still there under all the scar tissue.

Small fingers. A car window fogging from her breath. The sound of a cartoon song she wouldn’t stop humming. My mother laughing from the front seat.

Then nothing I’m willing to walk into all the way.

I blink hard once and keep moving.

Raven looks up just in time to see Lexi still holding onto me, and the expression on her face changes in a way I’m not prepared for. Not alarm. Not confusion exactly.

Something softer. Something more complicated. Something that makes me feel like I’ve stepped into deeper water without realizing it.

Lexi lets go the second she reaches her mother, because of course she does. The moment passes like it never happened.

Except it did. It absolutely did. And now I can still feel the ghost of that tiny hand around my finger while Raven thanks me for bringing her back from the kitchen like I did something more than walk down a hall.

I shrug it off and say, “She was supervising.”

Lexi nods solemnly. “He almost went the wrong way.”