Page 155 of Joker

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The thing with Lexi deepens so quietly I almost miss it until it’s already everywhere.

At first it’s little. Tiny things.

She wants Joker to open her juice box even if I’m standing right there and fully capable of doing it myself. She wants Joker to carry her to the bathroom because apparently walking is a burden she can no longer be expected to bear. She wants Jokerto look at every sticker, every coloring page, every random rock she finds outside and decides is a treasure.

And then somehow, without either of us noticing the exact moment it happens, it becomes more than that. It becomes preference.

Attachment.

The kind that sneaks up on you until suddenly it’s just part of the structure.

She wants Joker at bedtime. Not instead of me. Never instead of me. But with me.

If I’m tucking her in and he walks by the doorway, she’ll immediately sit up and say, “Joker, come too.”

If she’s upset because Bunny got left in the common room or somebody accidentally knocked over the tower she built with Jason, she wants me first and then, two breaths later, “Where’s Joker?”

If she’s eating a snack and he’s not in the room, she asks where he is before she finishes the first bite. And every time it happens, my chest does the same awful, beautiful thing.

Because it is sweet. God, it’s sweet. But it is also so emotionally dangerous I can barely look at it directly without feeling like I might shatter.

Because Lexi doesn’t attach lightly.

Not after Cal. Not after the fear. Not after all the instability of the last year.

And Joker…

Joker acts like it’s nothing.

Like it’s no big deal when she drags Bunny down the hall and asks him to “come too.” Like it doesn’t matter when she climbs into his lap without asking and curls there like she belongs. Like it’s completely normal for a little girl who once watched the world too carefully for her age to now seek him out with the blind confidence of a child who has decided this person is safe.

But I see it.

The way his whole body changes around her. The way he always catches her, always reaches back, always answers. The way his hand automatically settles on her back or the top of her head like he’s making sure she’s still there without even realizing he’s doing it. The way he watches her. The way he counts her without thinking. The way his whole expression shifts if she laughs too hard or gets too close to the stairs or vanishes around a corner longer than he likes.

He’s attached too.

Deeply. Quietly. Irrevocably.

And because I’m me and my brain is apparently a haunted house built entirely of fear and hope, that realization makes me want to both cry and run screaming into the woods.

Instead, I stand in the kitchen doorway one evening and watch him crouched on the floor helping Lexi reattach the leg back onto some poor stuffed dinosaur that did not survive her affection.

She’s talking a mile a minute, Bunny tucked under one arm, and Joker is listening with the kind of complete focus most grown adults don’t bother giving children.

He glances up when he feels me there.

Our eyes meet.

And in that one tiny, quiet moment, something inside me tips fully over. Because there is no universe where this man is pretending. No version of this where he is halfway in. He doesn’t know how to do halfway. He never did.

That should probably scare me more.

Instead, all I can think is:

Oh God.