[Theo’s POV]
Nina Torres gives me exactly one look when I walk into her office behind Annie. It lasts a quarter of a second and contains a full audit of who I am, why I'm here, and what my presence means for her client's case.
Then she turns to Annie and proceeds like I'm furniture with a good suit. She spreads the evidence across her desk the way a general lays out a campaign—payment trails, shell companies, the judge's records—and her voice is surgical. Motion to vacate. New judge. Two weeks if the court cooperates.
"Jake's team will fight this." Nina taps the edge of a filing. "Calloway doesn't lose gracefully, and his client can afford to keep swinging long past the point of reason."
"How hard?" Annie's voice is steady but her thumb is pressing a white crescent into the side of her index finger.
"Hard enough to make it ugly." Nina's mouth is a flat line. "Not hard enough to make it work—not with this paper trail. We file Monday."
Annie nods and stands, and the thing that always happens after legal meetings happens—something behind her eyes goes somewhere I can't follow. She buttons her coat with fingers that move too precisely, the kind of control people perform when the alternative is coming apart.
Outside, she walks toward the subway on autopilot. I steer us left toward a café three blocks south, because I've been keeping a running inventory of places to feed a woman who forgets eating is a biological requirement.
"I'm not hungry." She says it before I've even suggested anything, which means she's been tracking my tracking. Embarrassing for both of us.
"I am." I hold the door open. "You can watch me eat. I'm told it's riveting—people have wept."
Her mouth curves into a smile, small and unsure, but a smile nonetheless. She walks through the door and I take a small, idiotic victory lap inside my own skull. Embarrassing, have I said that already?
I order two sandwiches, slide one across the table without comment. She stares at it like I've presented her with a legal document requiring signature. Four minutes later she picks up one half with the look of doing me an enormous personal favor.
I let her pretend she doesn't need things. I've gotten very good at that part—the waiting, the not pushing, the quiet inventory of small victories.
She's halfway through the sandwich she didn't want when movement outside the window catches my peripheral vision and my body goes wrong before my brain catches up. A small figure on the sidewalk, barely hip-height, one hand waving a crayon at the sky. Dark blond hair in October light.
My coffee cup stops midair. Annie follows my gaze and the color leaves her face in real time. Neither of us moves.
Then Sarah's head turns toward the window—total, unfiltered—and her whole body detonates. She tears free from the nanny's grip and barrels through the café door.
"MOMMY!"
Annie is on her knees before I register her moving. Sarah slams into her and Annie's face buries in her hair, and the sound she makes—quiet, wrecked, pressed into those curls—isn't meant for witnesses. I look away because I owe her that.
The nanny stumbles in behind her, flushed and stammering. "I'm so sorry—she just bolted, I couldn't—"
"She's fine." I wave her toward a chair because she looks like someone who gets fired for this, and her panicked face tells me she knows it. "Sit down. Breathe. Nobody's in trouble."
Sarah pulls back from Annie, face wet and luminous, and her eyes find me. The grin that splits her face is incandescent—unfiltered recognition, the kind adults train themselves out of by age six. "You're the tall man!"
"Guilty as charged." My throat constricts and I cover it with a half-smile that’s trembling against my will.
"I made Sparkle Inferno a boyfriend." She announces this with the gravity of someone delivering a State of the Union address. "His name is Thunder Claw and he's very tall and he has blue eyes and he protects Sparkle Inferno from bad guys."
One finger raised—critical addendum, non-negotiable. "But he also lets her fight her own battles. Because she's very strong.”
The café disappears. My daughter is three feet away, describing me through a creature she invented, and she has no idea she's doing it. Tall. Blue eyes. Protects but steps aside when it counts.
She built me out of crayon logic and pure instinct and gave me the job of loving the thing she loves most. My lungs won't expand. Something behind my ribs fists shut and won't open.
She digs into her coat pocket and produces a folded paper, creased and smeared with color. Two creatures—one glittery and trailing sparks, one blue and slightly larger. Their tails are touching.
"That's them." Her finger lands on the blue one with the authority of a museum curator. "Thunder Claw is Sparkle Inferno's favorite person in the whole entire world."
I take the drawing. The paper is warm from her pocket, the crayon applied with the conviction of someone who has never doubted her art matters.
The nanny stands, smoothing her coat with nervous fingers. "I'm sorry—I really need to take her back. Mr. Reed has a schedule."
The name drops into the air between us and Annie's arms tighten around Sarah for one more breath before releasing. She presses her lips to Sarah's forehead. "I'll see you very soon, baby. I promise."
Sarah turns to me, face rearranging into something deadly serious. "Keep it safe, okay? Thunder Claw is Sparkle Inferno's favorite, so you have to take really good care of him."
"I will." My voice comes out rough and low and nothing like the man who runs board meetings. "I promise, Sarah."
She takes the nanny's hand and goes without crying—that terrible composure no child her age should possess. One wave through the glass, crayon clutched in her other fist, and the sidewalk takes her from me.
My daughter, walking back toward the house of a man who buys judges. She just handed me a portrait of the father she doesn't know she has and told me to keep it safe. The drawing trembles and I realize my hands are the source.
I lower myself to the floor beside Annie because standing has become a thing my body refuses to participate in. The tile is cold through my slacks and she's still on her knees, staring at the door Sarah walked through.
I don't touch her because she hasn't asked. I'm learning—slowly, badly—that not every crisis requires me to strategize a solution.
The drawing sits in my lap—two crayon creatures with their tails intertwined. My daughter hasn't learned to spell properly yet, but she's already figured out what matters.
I fold it carefully along the existing crease and slide it into my jacket pocket, against my chest. The paper is thin and warm and it burns through the fabric like a brand.
Her phone buzzes against the table above us. She reaches for it, and her hand freezes. Jake. A photograph of the café window, taken from across the street—two people at a table, a child running through a door.
Annie tilts the screen toward me. The angle is surveillance-precise, the work of someone who was already watching before Sarah ever spotted us through the glass.