First thing. All of it. A long pause. Then all of it. Yes.
Darius set the phone on his nightstand and closed his eyes. He told himself to sleep. The morning would come. The complications would come. Richard Voss and his lawyers and his 18 months of careful scheming would come and whatever Victoria hadn't told him would come.
And all of it would need to be dealt with one clear-headed decision at a time. But what he felt right now in the quiet of his apartment with his daughter breathing in the next room and a woman he didn't yet fully understand, sending him messages at 2 in the morning was not fear. It was something older and more complicated than fear. It felt uncomfortably and precisely like the beginning of something. And Darius Coleman, who had spent 2 years teaching himself not to want things he couldn't control, lay in the dark and let himself feel it anyway.
Because some beginnings don't ask permission. They just start. The morning came fast and cold. Darius was already at his kitchen table with coffee and his laptop open when Amara patted out of her bedroom at 6:53. Hair everywhere, stuffed elephant tucked under her arm, wearing the expression of someone who had been awake for exactly 2 minutes and was already suspicious.
Daddy, she said, you didn't sleep. I slept. Your eyes are tired. Eyes can't be tired. Yes, they can.
She climbed in on the chair across from him with the efficiencies of a child who has been navigating adult furniture her whole life. What's wrong? Nothing's wrong, baby. You're lying. She said it without accusation, just observation.
The way she said most things, your forehead does the thing. What thing? The thing where it goes like this. She scrunched her own forehead into a tight line between her eyebrows. That's your thinking too hard face.
You do it when something's wrong and you don't want to tell me. Darius looked at his 7-year-old daughter and felt the particular exhaustion of raising child who was smarter than most of the rooms he walked into. I have something complicated at work, he said. I'm figuring it out. Amara considered this.
Is it the kind of complicated where you fix it or the kind where it fixes itself? The kind where I fix it? Then you'll be fine," she said simply, and reached across the table to pull his coffee mug toward her so she could wrap her small hands around it for warmth, which she did every morning, and which she knew he allowed because it was the one rule in the Coleman household that existed purely because it made him smile. What's for breakfast? What do you want?