Chapter 9: Six O'Clock
He was there at five fifty-eight.
He stood outside the safe house door with nothing in his hands, which was the strangest he had felt in years.
No phone.
No briefcase.
No silver pocket watch — he had left it on the table inside, deliberately, because he didn't want to check the time every thirty seconds.
He knocked.
Footsteps.
Small, fast ones.
The door opened and Lily stood there in socks with small strawberries on them, holding the rabbit by one ear.
She looked at him.
"You came back," she said.
"I said I would."
She considered this with the gravity of a person for whom promises are not yet ordinary.
"Mama's making pasta," she said.
"She only makes pasta when something good happened or something bad happened.
She said it's good this time."
"It is good this time."
Lily nodded, satisfied, and turned and walked back into the apartment.
He followed.
The kitchen smelled of garlic and something warm.
Sophia was at the stove with her back to him, stirring.
She had changed into a blue sweater.
Her hair was down.
"Six o'clock," she said without turning around.
"Five fifty-eight."
"Early is its own kind of punctual." She glanced over her shoulder.
One look.
Then back to the stove.
"Sit down.
It's almost ready."
He sat at the small table.
Lily climbed into the chair across from him and arranged the rabbit in her lap with the focused attention of a person conducting important business.
"Do you like pasta?" she asked.
"Yes."
"What kind?"
"Any kind."
Lily looked skeptical.
"That's what people say when they don't have a favourite yet."
"Maybe I haven't found my favourite yet."
"Mama's is the best," Lily said.
"So probably after tonight you'll know."
Sophia set a bowl in front of him without ceremony.
Then one for Lily.
Then she sat down with her own.
For a moment, no one said anything.
Then Lily picked up her fork and said, "Are you going to be around now?"
Sophia's fork paused.
Dominic looked at the small face across from him.
The crease between her eyebrows.
His crease.
"I'd like to be," he said.
"If your mama thinks that's okay."
Lily turned to Sophia.
Sophia met her daughter's eyes.
Something passed between them — the particular silent language of two people who have been a unit for five years and know each other's weight and warmth without needing words.
"We'll see," Sophia said.
Lily turned back to Dominic.
"That means yes," she said confidentially.
"She says 'we'll see' when she means yes but she wants to think about it first."
"Lily."
"It's true."
"Eat your pasta."
Lily ate her pasta.
Dominic ate his pasta.
It was, in fact, the best he had ever had.
He didn't say so.
He didn't need to — Sophia caught him on his second bowl and something shifted at the corner of her mouth that wasn't quite a smile but was close enough.
After dinner, Lily showed him her drawings.
She had a folder of them — thick with pages, organized by some system only she understood.
She narrated each one with the seriousness of a curator.
"This is our building.
This is the orange cat.
This is my kindergarten.
This is Noah — he eats glue, which is bad.
This is Mama when she's happy.
This is Mama when she's sad.
I can tell the difference."
"How?"
Lily pointed.
"Happy Mama has her hair down.
Sad Mama has it up."
Dominic glanced at Sophia across the room.
Her hair was down.
At seven fifteen, Sophia said it was time for bed.
Lily negotiated for one more drawing, lost, and then negotiated for two more minutes, which was granted.
At seven twenty-eight she was in her room with the rabbit and the nightlight and the door open a crack.
Sophia came back to the kitchen.
She poured two glasses of water and set one in front of Dominic and sat down.
"She'll be asleep in four minutes," she said.
"She always is."
"She showed me forty-seven drawings."
"She has more."
He looked at her across the table.
"I missed five years," he said.
"Yes."
"I know that's not something I can—"
"No," she said.
"It isn't.
But you didn't know.
That matters." She wrapped her hands around her glass.
"What I'm still deciding is what comes next.
Not for Lily — she's already decided, clearly.
For me."
"What would help you decide?"
She looked at him for a long moment.
"Honesty," she said.
"About what your world looks like now.
About what safe actually means for us if you're in our lives.
About whether you can be the person who shows up at six o'clock and sits at a small table and listens to forty-seven drawings — not just tonight, but on the ordinary nights.
The boring nights.
The nights when nothing is urgent."
"I want to be that person," he said.
"Wanting isn't the same as being."
"No.
It isn't." He held her gaze.
"I can't promise you that my world becomes simple.
I can promise you that I'm going to make every decision from here forward with you and Lily as the centre of it.
Not a liability.
Not a weakness.
The centre."
Sophia was quiet.
From down the hall, there was no sound.
Lily was asleep.
"She drew you," Sophia said suddenly.
"What?"
"This afternoon.
Before you came.
She drew a picture of a man at a big door." Sophia's voice was careful.
"She didn't know what to call it.
She just said 'the man who came home with me.' She put it in the folder with the others."
Dominic looked at the table.
"She filed me," he said.
"She filed you," Sophia confirmed.
He looked up at her.
She was watching him with those eyes that had never been unimpressed by anything he had — not his suits, not his name, not his power, not his silence.
Only by the things that actually mattered.
"I'd like to earn a better label than that," he said.
"Then earn it," she said simply.
She stood and picked up the glasses and set them in the sink.
She stood at the window for a moment, looking out at the street below — quiet now, ordinary, no black sedans, no men in parked cars, just the city going about its evening.
"Come back Saturday," she said.
"Lily has a drawing class in the morning.
You can take her.
She'll talk the entire way there and the entire way back."
"I'll bring coffee."
"She doesn't drink coffee."
"The coffee is for me."
Sophia turned from the window.
The corner of her mouth moved.
This time it was a smile.
Small, careful, real.
"Saturday," she said.
"Nine o'clock."
"Nine o'clock," he said.
He picked up his coat.
He walked to the door.
He stopped with his hand on the frame and looked back at her — standing in the small kitchen of the safe house, in the blue sweater, with her hair down.
"Thank you for the pasta," he said.
"Thank you for coming back," she said.
He walked out into the quiet hallway and pulled the door gently closed behind him.
He heard both locks turn.
The deadbolt first.
Then the second one.
He stood there for a moment in the silence.
Then he walked down the stairs and out into the night, and for the first time in six years, he did not feel like a man who had made the right decision by walking away.
He felt like a man who had finally, carefully, found his way back.
---
*Some of the most important things in life don't announce themselves — they arrive in yellow rain boots on the wrong feet, asking the one question you weren't ready for.*
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