Page 132 of Redline Baby

Kit is still holding both stuffed animals when I look at him again. His eyes are swollen. Hair a mess. Blanket wrapped around him like armor.

“Want to build a fort?”

He blinks. Looks up. Something in his expression shifts, softening a little. And I’m already moving before he answers. I grab the nearest cushion, the thick one from the armchair, and haul it to the middle of the living room floor.

Kit watches me, then his feet hit the floor. He picks up the throw blanket where it has fallen and carries it to the growing pile without being asked. Every cushion in the apartment eventually migrates into the living room. The couch cushions come off one by one. I pull two dining chairs over and drape sheets between them, anchoring the corners with binder clips from the desk drawer.

The finished structure is objectively terrible. Sheets at strange angles. One wall leaning suspiciously. The structural engineering would not survive professional review. But it has a door. A low flap of fabric that requires us to duck beneath it. Inside, the floor is nothing but blankets and cushions.

Kit crawls in first. I follow. The space is small enough that we have no choice but to stay close. He lines Duffy and the new bunny against the far wall of cushions. I prop my phone against a pillow. Studio Ghibli.

Ponyo.

“Hungry?”

Kit nods. Doesn’t look at me. His attention has already moved to the screen, following the opening credits. He might be nonverbal for a while. It happens sometimes when he slips deeply into Little space, especially after being frightened this badly.

That’s fine. I don’t need words from him. I order McDonald’s on my phone.

Something I would normally consider grounds for intervention.

Fast food in an apartment where meals are cooked from actual ingredients and eaten at an actual table.

Today, I don’t care. When it arrives twenty minutes later, we eat it inside the fort. Fries straight from the paper bag. Nuggets dipped in sweet-and-sour sauce. Kit curled against my side beneath the sheet roof while a cartoon plays on my phone. The battery ticks down. Eighty percent. Sixty-three. Fifty-two. Forty-eight.

Kit notices. His eyes narrow. Then he giggles. The first sound that has felt completely like him since I came through the door. He points at the battery indicator.

“You’d be punished if you were me.”

I look at the number. Then at him.

“Good thing I’m the Daddy and I wrote the rule.”

“Corrupt system.”

His mouth twitches. I kiss his forehead. There he is.

Chapter 30. Kit

Soren is at the back counter, and I’m working on a particularly stubborn bike when he says it.

I still haven’t forgotten what it felt like to wake up to an empty bed. No calls. No messages. He told me before he left. I know that now. I know it was Rue, know she was sick, know he had every reason in the world to go. He apologized for not waking me properly and for not checking his phone afterward. We talked about it. We built a fucking fort about it.

None of that changes the fact that I hated it.

It cracked something back open, and there’s still a small part of me that hasn’t figured out how to close it again.

“I have a surprise for you, baby.” Soren’s voice comes from behind me. “Your bike’s almost done. Maybe two more days.”

My hand stops on the wrench. I hadn’t noticed he was working on my Yamaha. Weirdly, I don’t feel excited.

The truth is, I’ve been dreading this exact sentence for months. Vera has been mechanically roadworthy for weeks, the last of the work mostly cosmetic: fairing alignment Soren decided wasn’t quite right, paint he wanted touched up, trim pieces he kept finding reasons to fuss over. Things that could have been finished in an afternoon if either of us had pushed.

I never pushed.

Every time he brought it up, I told him not to rush. Take your time. No hurry.

And I meant it in a way that scared me a little even while I said it, because some part of me had quietly decided, without ever putting words to it, that as long as the Yamaha sat half-finished on a lift, I had a permanent, unkillable reason to keep showing up at Halverson Moto every day.