He holds out the carving to Macie.
She unstuffs her thumb and looks at it. Then she reaches out and takes it in both hands, turning it the same way he was turning it — her own instinct to feel the shape. She examines it with the serious focus of someone conducting an appraisal.
"Bear," she says.
"Bear," he confirms.
She clutches it to her chest and her eyes close for a moment — not sleep, just the satisfaction of something received. The thumb goes back in.
He looks at me.
"I was gone all afternoon," he says.
"I noticed."
"I was fixing up the spare room."
My chest tightens. I wait.
"Macie'll need a nightlight," he says. "I figured that was a reasonable assumption. I bought one. It's a moon."
I can't speak for a moment.
"She does need a nightlight," I say.
He nods. He looks at the fire and then back at me. He is not a man who makes speeches. He is a man who drove to the hardware store and bought a moon-shaped nightlight and put it in the room he'd been using for storage.
"I missed three years," he says. "I'm not missing any more. Whatever that looks like — you here, me there, some version between — I'm in. All the way."
"Colm —"
"I know what I'm asking. I know it's fast and I know it's not simple. I'm not asking you to decide tonight. I'm asking you to know that when you decide, the spare room has a nightlight in it and the bed's made up and I've learned the story voice."
Macie's weight shifts on my hip. She's going, finally — that particular loosening that means sleep is winning.
"I've been doing this alone since before she was born."
"I know that too." His voice is level. "I'm not going to let you do it alone anymore. That's not a promise about logistics. That's just a fact about who I am."
I look at him. The firelight is on his face — the steadiness of him, the particular patience of a man who knows something and is waiting for you to know it too.
"We'd need to figure out the practical things," I say.
"Yeah."
"There's a lot of practical things."
"Yeah."
"I'm not easy," I say. "I haven't had to account for anyone else's preferences in two years. I'll probably be difficult."
"I've run festival logistics for eight years," he says. "I have a high tolerance for complicated."
I laugh despite everything.
Macie makes a small sound in her sleep. The bear is still clutched against her chest.
"Okay," I say.
