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I don’t like how quickly that happened. A few weeks ago, I had gone nineteen years without Adrien Delmonte in my life and managed just fine.

Technically.

Maybe “fine” is generous.

Still.

Now just a few hours without him makes me feel awful.

I curl on the couch beneath a throw blanket with my pacifier between my lips and Rabbit tucked under my chin, but even that doesn’t help much because most of the things that make me feel little have Adrien attached to them somehow.

The cup he fills for me, the blanket he drapes over my legs, the pacifier he washes when I drop it, the bunny slippers he bought, the crayons he sits beside me while I use.

Daddy is everywhere even when he isn’t here.

I mope on the couch for a while, the loneliness growing worse every second he’s not here to cling to.

A little after ten, I sit up. I need to do something. Something good. Something that isn’t waiting.

That is how I end up deciding to make Daddy a present.

I want him to come home and know I thought about him while he was gone.

I scoop Rabbit up by the middle and tuck Bear beneath my other arm. “Come on.” There’s nobody here to judge me for talking to them.

I carry them both down the hall to my room.

My room.

I have started calling it that in my head.

I don’t know when.

At first it was the room I’m trapped in.

Then the room.

Then the bedroom.

Then my room.

Though it’s really my room, just until Daddy can bring me home.

I can’t wait. Daddy has a two-bedroom bungalow, and he says the empty second bedroom will be my room. More like my playroom instead of a bedroom, though, because I’ll get to sleep in Daddy’s bed with him every night.

He says all of my things here can come with us, and that he’ll get me even more stuff once we’re there.

But for now, this is my room, with its plain walls and bland furniture. It has gotten better since he started buying me things. Like, under the bed, I have a big plastic bin full of craft supplies.

I set Rabbit and Bear side by side at the edge of the bed, their soft bodies propped against the pillows. Then I drag the bin into the middle of the floor, its scrape loud in the quiet room. I lie down on my stomach, my oversized sweater riding up to expose a strip of skin above my underwear. I kick my feet lazily behind me, my toes brushing against each other in their fuzzy socks, and start digging through layers of construction paper, half-used sticker sheets, and tangled yarn.

Near the bottom, my fingers hit something solid—a plain wooden picture frame, unfinished and a little rough around the edges.

Perfect.

I pull it out, then start looking for what I want to use to decorate it. It doesn’t take very long at all for me to amass a pile of potential.

I unscrew the cap on the pink glitter glue, squeeze a thick, sparkly line around the outer edge, then press jewels into each corner—red, purple, green, and pink.