But god, he missed her. Missed the smell of her, that soft warm thing underneath the soap honey, wild flowers and peach that used to fill up a room the second she walked into it.
He wouldn't have said that out loud for anything. Wouldn't have admitted, even to himself in most lighting, how many times a day he found some excuse to walk past her door just to catch a hint of it drifting through the crack.
This, the front room, the shrieking, the wet carpet this was as close as he got. And if some small ugly hopeful part of him thought maybe she'd come down at some point, maybe she'd stand in the doorway and see him sitting there being good, being safe, being exactly the kind of steady uncomplicated presence a woman wanted around her children, well. Nobody had to know that either.
"You're squeezing kind of hard," he told Frost, mildly, not actually minding.
