Page 137 of Hunt Me, Daddy

“That’s the whole response? Just yes?”

“What would you like me to say?”

“Something more sympathetic.”

“I’m very sympathetic,” he said. “While it’s happening.”

I looked at him for a long moment. “You are absolutely not.”

The corner of his mouth moved. “I am thorough,” he allowed.

I opened my mouth to reply to that, and he said quietly:

“Even good girls get spankings sometimes,solnyshko, but you know that already, don’t you?”

I looked down.

My fingers found the hem of his shirt, and I ran my thumb along the bottom button without thinking about it, which was unlike me. I thought about everything. I thought compulsively and in sequence and with detailed annotation.

I was not thinking right now.

Or rather: I was thinking one thing, small and clear, in the part of myself I had been not-naming since last night.

Oh.

So this is what this is.

I had spent a very long time managing myself. Getting enough sleep to function. Eating when the cognitive decline became noticeable. Coming home because there were files at home. Making decisions about risk because risk assessment was a skill I had developed out of necessity and applied rigorously, because the alternative was Daniel’s outcome.

I had done all of that alone for years. I had been, it turned out, quite competent at it. I had also been, it turned out—and I was going to need additional time before I said this out loud—quite tired of taking care of myself.

His hand came to the back of my head.

“Kit,” he said.

“I’m fine,” I said to the hem of the shirt.

“Yes,” he said. “But you don’t have to be.”

He said it like it was true regardless of what I said next. Like my fine-ness was not contingent on my own assessment of it. Like he had already taken the inventory, reached his own conclusion, and was simply waiting for me to arrive at the same one.

I looked up.

He was watching me with that patience. The specific patience I had spent some time resenting because it had no edges to push against. It simply waited.

“This is a lot,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t do this well.”

“You’re doing it now.”

“Badly.”

“No,” he said. “Just for the first time.”

I looked at him for a long moment.