Seth exhales under his breath.
“That looks just like her,” he says.
Elise’s voice is careful. “I know.”
He shifts, crouching so he is level with her instead of above her. His hands rest loose on his knees.
“I used to sketch in class when I was a kid. Drove my teachers crazy.”
Her eyes flick up. “You draw?”
“I did…Before everything else. Then it turned into tattooing.”
Her forehead creases. “You’re a tattoo artist?”
“Yeah,” he answers. “Turns out people are a lot less mad when you draw on their skin if they asked you to.”
That earns a small sound from her, halfway between a scoff and a laugh. She catches herself and looks back down at the page like it slipped out by accident.
“Mom used to draw too,” she says after a moment. “She said it helped her think when her head got loud.”
Seth’s gaze shifts to her hands, to the way she’s pressing the pencil harder than she needs to. He nods once. “Yeah. That sounds right.”
Elise hesitates, then glances up at him. “She used to draw pictures of you, too. When you were little. She kept them up in her art room.”
Something tightens in Seth’s expression, small but there. He doesn’t look away. “She did?”
Elise nods, then drops her eyes back to the page like she said more than she meant to. She doesn’t start over this time. She keeps going, adding detail, darkening lines, building on what’s already there instead of erasing it.
I lean against the counter and watch them both. Nothing is being fixed here. No one is saving anyone. But something is starting to take shape anyway, quiet and real, without anyone forcing it.
At the table, Ryan sits shoulder to shoulder with Travis. The laptop screen throws pale light across Ryan’s face, reflecting in his eyes as lines of code scroll past. It might as well be another language to me, but to him it looks like a puzzle waiting to be solved.
Travis doesn’t rush him. He explains each step for Ryan to follow.
“So if I change this,” Ryan asks quietly, pointing with one careful finger, “it reroutes the request?”
“Yeah,” Travis replies. “You’re not forcing your way in. You’re just telling it to knock somewhere else.”
Ryan nods, absorbing that. He leans closer, reading every line twice before touching the keyboard. His fingers hover for a second, then he types, like he is afraid the wrong keystroke might break the whole thing. The screen refreshes. A new window opens.
Ryan’s shoulders lift just slightly. “It worked.”
Travis smiles. “Told you. Systems don’t like being bullied. They respond better when you listen to them.”
Ryan keeps staring at the screen, unblinking. Then he glances up at Travis, searching his face.
“I didn’t mess it up.”
“No, you did it right.”
Ryan nods once. His hands settle on the keyboard.
I watch from the kitchen and realize something small but important. Ryan doesn’t just need reassurance or praise. He needs proof. He needs to see that when he follows the rules of a system, it behaves the way it is supposed to.
Travis gives him that without making a big deal out of it.
Ryan types again, a little faster this time.
