I pull it out.
A white tank top and sleep shorts with what appears to be a repeating pattern of tiny cartoon clouds.
I hold it up. “This?”
She stares at the pajamas. Then at me. Something flickers across her face that I can’t quite read.
“It doesn’t have a cinnamon roll on it,” I say, because that seemed to be important to her.
That startles a laugh out of her. Short and baffled, and entirely genuine.
“You remembered that?”
“I remember everything you say.”
The words come out more plainly than I intended. No softening. No deflection. Just fact.
Just the quiet acknowledgment that she’s the center of my universe.
She goes very still.
Then she takes the pajamas from my hands, fingers brushing mine, and disappears into the bathroom without another word.
I stand there for a moment in the quiet of the room, listening to the muffled sounds of her moving around on the other side of the door, and think about the fact that I just told her I remember everything she says.
Because I do.
I have filed away years of information about her. Every dry observation. Every tangential thought that arrives mid-sentence and derails the original point. Every piece of dragon lore. Every rambling story about books and family group chats and the structural injustice of office air conditioning.
All of it.
Filed away.
She talks through the door while she’s changing—a stream-of-consciousness explanation about Cinnamoroll who is apparently not a cinnamon roll but a cartoon character. Then she moves on to a sleepover she’d rather forget and what sounds like a philosophy of personal identity that she’s working out in real time.
I don’t follow all of it.
But I love every word of it.
When she emerges, scrubbed clean of most of her makeup and with her hair down, in the cloud pajamas with the dragon clutch still somehow in her hand—she looks so entirely herself that something in my chest simply aches.
“Water,” I say quietly. “And Advil.”
She accepts both without argument this time, which tells me the long day is finally catching up with her. She sits on the edge of the bed and takes them with the gravity of someone following doctor’s orders, then looks up at me.
“Will you stay?” she asks. “Just until I fall asleep.”
I pull the chair closer to the bed and sit down. “Yeah.”
She lies back against the pillow, pulling the blanket up, and watches me for a moment with those half-closed eyes.
“Miller.”
“Hmm.”
“Why did you really say not tonight?”
I look at her steadily. “Because I want more than one night.”
