Page 80 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“Mr. Garrick,” Toby said. “Could I… Would it be all right if I called you Dad?”

The room went out from under his feet.

He was distantly aware of Maris beside him and her hand coming up over her mouth. He went to one knee on the rug so his eyes were level with the boy’s. He looked into the hazel eyes that were Maris’s eyes. This was the largest thing anyone had ever handed him and he had about three seconds to not ruin it.

“Yes,” he said roughly.

His eyes were gold. He could feel it. He didn’t care.

“Yes,” he repeated more calmly. “I’d like that more than anything I can think of.”

Toby considered this and nodded once. Then, as if a matter of policy had been settled and did not require ceremony, he simply stepped forward and leaned his whole small weight against Garrick’s chest, wings and all. He brought one enormous careful hand up to cradle the back of the boy’s head and didn’t trust himself to say another word. Over the top of Toby’s head he saw Maris. She wasn’t even bothering to hide the tears. She just stood there with both hands over her mouth and her eyes streaming and nodded at him, yes, yes, yes. He had built companies. He had restored a ruin. He had never in thirty-eight years held anything like this.

“Okay,” Toby said, muffled, into his shirt. “Can I see the map now?”

“In a minute.”

“Okay.” Toby stayed where he was, tucked against his chest, in no hurry to move.

They ended up on the rug, all three of them, with the ridge proposal spread out around them and Toby explaining it back to them wrong in the best way. And it was Toby’s easy occupation of the room that gave Garrick the nerve for the last thing. The boy had decided, in five minutes, that this was home, and moved the family into it in his head. Garrick had taken fifteen years. It was time.

“Since we’re going to live here,” he said, “there’s something I need to do.”

She looked up.

“My father.” He kept his voice level. “He’s in the west wing. He’s been in that room for fifteen years and I’ve kept the door shut on him for fifteen years, and I don’t want to do that anymore. Not with the two of you in the house. Not with—” he glanced at Toby, absorbed in the survey “—with him growing up here.”

“Where do you want him?” she asked without flinching. He loved her, distinctly and specifically, for not flinching from it.

“The rose garden.” His throat worked. “They were happy there. He designed the walls and she designed the plantings and they used to argue about it out there, the way—” he almost smiled “—the way you and I argue about fallen walls. I think he’d rather be there than in a dark room with the drapes shut. I think that’s where he’d want to end up. In her garden. In the open. Where people go.”

She reached over and put her hand on his knee. “Yes,” she said. “Of course.”

“Good.” He nodded, the familiar clean relief of a problem identified and solved settling over him.

And then she tilted her head, and a slow, wicked, entirely practical light came into her hazel eyes—the look she got when she was about to point out something he’d overlooked. The look that had started every good argument they’d ever had.

“How,” she said, “are you planning to move him?”

He opened his mouth.

His father was carved stone, a full-grown gargoyle gone permanently to the rock. A ton, at least. More. Waiting in a room at the end of a corridor. Garrick was strong—stronger than any human, strong enough to bend rebar in his hands. And he could not so much as tip that weight, let alone carry it across the house and out into a garden alone without breaking the statue or the house or both.

He shut his mouth again.

He had spent the entire autumn fixing things. Sending Bobcats. Guaranteeing losses. Restoring a ruin, quietly taking care of everyone within reach and never once letting any of them take care of him. He looked at the immovable fact of his father and understood, with the same flat certainty he brought to everything, that there was exactly one way this got done.

“I’m going to have to ask for help,” he said. It came out as if the words were unfamiliar in his mouth. They were.

Her smile was the best thing he’d seen in fifteen years of shut doors.

“Yes,” she said gently. “You are.”

He looked at Toby, who had put on the hard hat that lived in the study now—his hard hat, oversized and adored—and was studying the survey as if he might be consulted. He looked at Maris, dirt still on her jaw, sitting on his floor relaxed and at home.

Then he reached for his phone.

“Aidan first,” he said, already scrolling. “He’s got the strength and he’s still in town. Then Eric. Grondar, if he can shut the bakery for a morning—he’s the strongest male in the county and I will still need four more. And a sledge and rollers, and somebody who knows how to move dressed stone without cracking it⁠—”