Chapter Text
"Come on, guys, if we're late again I'm hauling you over the fence and calling it a day. I have a record for children-hoisting and I intend to defend it."
Louella's voice carried up through the house from the bottom of the stairs, equal parts threat and entertainment, the particular tone that had become as familiar as the heating's hum or the creak of the third stair. Somewhere above, Zoey's response arrived muffled through several layers of duvet.
"Ughh. It's way too early, Mom."
"Suit yourself," Louella called back, entirely unbothered. "Your sisters will eat all the breakfast, though."
The threat worked exactly as well as it always did. Within thirty seconds there was the sound of feet hitting the floor with considerably more urgency than a moment ago, and the duvet situation resolved itself.
Riley and Daisy were already two stairs ahead of everyone else, descending at the specific velocity of twelve-year-olds who had decided that mornings were, on balance, a competitive sport. They hit the kitchen at a dead run, all elbows and momentum, and Michael, already at the stove, already wearing the expression of a man who genuinely loved this exact chaos, caught Daisy mid-trajectory and spun her once before setting her down, then did the same for Riley before she'd even finished demanding her turn.
"Morning, girls."
"Morning, Dad," they said, more or less in unison, and slid into their chairs with the practised choreography of a year's worth of identical mornings.
Daisy's hair had grown out properly now, past her shoulders, dark and glossy, gathered this morning into two neat ponytails that Suzie had done before disappearing into the bathroom for her skincare routine, which had become its own small institution in the house, conducted with the same seriousness she brought to everything.
Riley's hair was shorter than it had ever been at Sacred Heart, choppy and a bit uneven where she'd insisted on cutting it herself, a decision Louella had initially fought and then, on reflection, let go of entirely, because some independence was worth more than symmetry.
Abby came down last. Mornings remained, for her, something that happened to her rather than something she participated in willingly. She moved through the kitchen doorway with her eyes barely open and went directly to Louella's side, attaching herself there with the specific gravity of someone who had decided, roughly eleven months ago, that this was an acceptable strategy for surviving the first hour of consciousness, and had seen no reason to revise the theory since.
"Uh-oh," Louella said, looking down at her. "We've got a cuddlebug situation."
She pressed a kiss to the top of Abby's head, soft and unhurried, the kind of gesture that had become so unremarkable in this house that nobody else even looked up from their cereal. Abby made a small sound that wasn't quite words and burrowed slightly further into her side.
"Five more minutes," she mumbled.
"You get until the waffles are ready. Which is—" Louella checked the timer "—four minutes. I'm being generous."
Abby accepted this ruling without further negotiation, mostly because she'd fallen half-asleep again standing up, which had become its own kind of family legend, Abby, capable of sleeping vertically, a skill nobody else in the house had managed to replicate. By the time the waffles were actually ready, Suzie and Zoey had both made it down, Suzie immaculate as ever, not a hair loose from this morning's braid, moving through the kitchen with the particular economy that had never quite left her even now, a year into not having to ration anything. She still checked, automatically, whether everyone had a plate before she sat down with her own. Louella had stopped trying to talk her out of it months ago. Some things you didn't argue with. You just made sure there was always enough, so the checking cost nothing.
"Smells amazing," Zoey said, dropping into her chair, hair still doing its magnificent untamed thing despite a year of conditioner and proper brushes and everything else that should, by now, have civilised it. It hadn't. Nobody minded. Breakfast happened the way it happened most mornings, loud, slightly chaotic, the five of them talking over each other about homework and the weekend and whether Riley's claim about the school's new sports equipment was actually true or aspirational.
Michael presided over the waffle iron like a man conducting an orchestra. Louella drank her coffee standing up, one hip against the counter, watching all of it with the expression she still hadn't quite stopped being faintly amazed by, a year in.
The uniforms went on after breakfast, soft grey jumpers, the school's crest small and unassuming on the chest, nothing like the stiff black-and-white of Sacred Heart's. The school itself, which Louella had chosen with the same thoroughness she brought to medical decisions, sat on the edge of the city in a converted manor house with small classes and a staff who seemed to genuinely believe that children learned differently and that this wasn't a character flaw requiring correction.
Abby had taken to it slowly, the way she took to most new things, but the reading specialist they'd assigned her had worked miracles in eleven months that Sacred Heart's sermon-reading sessions never could have managed in ten years. She still stumbled sometimes, reading aloud. Nobody made her feel small about it anymore.
Suzie had decided, sometime around month three, that she wanted to be a doctor. She'd announced it at dinner with the particular careful seriousness she brought to important declarations, and Louella had gone very quiet for a second before saying, of course you do, in a voice that was trying very hard not to do anything dramatic with the moment and not quite succeeding. Since then, Suzie had taken to following her into the kitchen when she talked through cases, asking precise, well-considered questions, and Louella had started, without really announcing it, letting her sit in on the less invasive consultations during summer holidays. She hadn't told Suzie how proud this made her. She suspected Suzie knew anyway.
"Bubble first?" Michael asked, herding everyone toward the car with the particular energy of a man counting down to Friday with genuine personal investment.
"BUBBLE FIRST," Riley and Daisy said, together, with the kind of unified enthusiasm that had become a running joke in the household, the two of them increasingly inseparable, increasingly co-conspiratorial, increasingly likely to finish each other's sentences in a way that suggested sisterhood had settled into them at the cellular level.
The drive to school happened with Bubble's most recent album at a volume Louella had long since stopped trying to moderate, on the grounds that the concert was Friday and Michael's enthusiasm could not be reasoned with regardless, and there was something to be said for choosing your battles. Riley knew every word. Daisy knew most of them and improvised the rest with total confidence. Zoey drew on the back of an old receipt with one hand and mouthed along with the other. Suzie sang quietly, almost despite herself, the corners of her mouth twitching upward when she caught Abby watching her do it.
Abby leaned her head against the window and watched the city go by, streets she now knew, a route that had become so familiar it barely registered as navigation anymore, just home becoming school becoming home again, the simple unremarkable geography of an ordinary life. She thought, sometimes, about how strange it was that ordinary had become available to her at all.
The school's headmaster met them in the entrance hall, as he tended to most mornings, a tall, somewhat theatrical man named Caine who had a fondness for waistcoats that bordered on the architectural and an enthusiasm for the school's "cultural enrichment programme" that occasionally outpaced what anyone had actually asked him to be enthusiastic about.
"Ah! The Dobby contingent!" He said this most mornings, with the same delighted inflection, as if their arrival were a recurring and pleasant surprise rather than a daily occurrence. "Zoey! A word, if I may—"
Zoey, halfway through the door, turned.
"The festival artwork," Caine started, with the gravity of a man discussing matters of state. "Is it ready? The committee has been asking. There's been talk, Zoey. Anticipatory talk."
"It's ready," Zoey said, and her smile had none of the careful hesitancy it would have had a year ago, just straightforward pride, easy and earned. "I finished the final panel last night."
"Splendid. Splendid." Caine pressed a hand briefly to his chest as though genuinely moved. "The committee will be thrilled. I myself am already thrilled, preemptively, on their behalf." He swept off toward his office with the particular drama of a man who treated every school day as a faintly operatic event, and Zoey watched him go with the fond exasperation that the whole staff seemed to inspire in her, equal parts affection and mild disbelief that this was simply how school worked now.
The artwork in question, Abby had seen it taking shape over the past month, evenings at the kitchen table, careful and ambitious in a way the burned sketchbook would never have allowed her to attempt, was a mural-sized piece for the school's main hall. Five panels. She hadn't shown anyone the finished version yet, not even Abby, which meant whatever was in it mattered enough to be revealed properly, on its own terms, when she was ready. Abby thought she had a guess what was in it. She didn't ask. Some things were better arrived at than asked for.
The school day passed the way school days passed now, ordinary, occasionally tedious, occasionally interesting, entirely survivable.
Abby had a English class where they were reading something new, not Mockingbird this time, but she still thought about Scout sometimes, about mockingbirds and sin and the particular kind of grief that grew around itself rather than away. She had a teacher who let her read silently and present her analysis aloud instead, which had changed everything about how much she actually enjoyed reading rather than dreaded the performance of it.
At three-thirty, the five of them were collected, most of them by Michael, Abby separately, because Wednesdays were her individual session day, the one day a week the group sessions gave way to something more private.
Dr Best's new office was nothing like the one at Sacred Heart.
It had proper carpet and a window that looked out over an actual garden and a small fish tank in the corner that he'd apparently set up because, he'd told her once, watching fish move had a measurable calming effect on most people, and he was not above using measurable effects. The chess king keychain was still on his desk, though it had migrated to a small dish beside his monitor, retired from active duty but clearly not going anywhere.
He looked up when she came in, and did the thing he always did, that brief, genuine warmth, unhurried, like there was nowhere he'd rather be in the next fifty minutes than exactly here.
"Abby." He gestured to the chair, which was the right size for her now, or she'd grown into it, she wasn't sure which. "How was your day?"
"Fine," she replied. Then, almost immediately, the way it had become reflexive over the past months: "Actually, pretty good, I think. We did some reading I liked. And Zoey finished her festival piece."
He made a note, unhurried. "That's the one she's been working on for the cultural festival?"
"Yeah. She hasn't shown anyone yet. Not even me."
"Are you curious?"
"A bit." She considered this honestly, which had become much easier than it used to be. "Mostly I just want her to be happy with it. Whatever's in it."
He looked at her for a moment with the particular attentiveness she'd catalogued, all that time ago, as different from most adults' attention. Still different. Still the same quality, a year on, of someone actually listening rather than waiting for his turn.
"You've changed how you answer that question," he said. "How was your day." She looked at him. "A year ago," he said, "you'd have said fine and that would have been the entire answer. Today you corrected yourself in the same breath." He set his pen down. "I notice things like that. It's sort of the job."
She thought about it. About the small smooth stone of being 'fine' that she'd carried around for so long, reaching for it automatically even when it didn't fit anymore. She thought about how it still came first, sometimes, old habits had long roots, but it didn't have to be the last word now. There was room after it for the truer thing.
"I think I just have more to say now," she said. "Before, there wasn't really... There wasn't a true answer that was safe to give. So fine just sort of covered everything." She paused. "Now there's an answer underneath it. Most days."
"And today's answer underneath it?"
She considered. "Good," she smiled. "Actually good. Not just okay-good. Properly good." She looked at the fish tank, at the small orange shape drifting through it without any apparent urgency. "I have homework I don't mind doing. I have a teacher who doesn't make me feel stupid for reading slowly. I have four sisters who are all, individually, completely ridiculous, and I love them so much it's sort of inconvenient sometimes." A pause. "I have a mum who kisses my head every morning whether I want it or not, which it turns out I always want, even when I pretend I'm too tired to notice."
Dr Best was quiet for a moment, his pen still. "That's a long way from twelve months ago," he said.
"Yeah." She looked at her hands. "I think about that sometimes. The girl who sat in that chair the first day, your old office, I mean, the one at Sacred Heart, and just said fine to everything because she didn't trust that anything else was safe to say." She paused. "I don't really feel like her anymore. Not in a bad way. Just different. Further along."
"Do you remember her kindly?" he asked. "That girl?"
The question caught her slightly off guard. She thought about it properly.
"Yeah," she said, finally. "She was doing her best with what she had. She didn't know any better, and she survived anyway. I think that's... I think that's actually really impressive, looking back." She paused. "I wouldn't want to go back to being her. But I don't think badly of her either. She got me here."
"That's a remarkably healthy way to hold that," he said. "Most people either romanticise who they were or punish them for not knowing better. You've found something more generous than either."
"I had good teachers," she said. She thought of Suzie's patient voice over Mockingbird, of Louella saying don't be a kid, just be you, of this man across the desk who had filed a report the same day rather than the next, who had written I'll see what I can do to make you feel better and then actually, fully, completely had.
"How's the rest of the group?" he asked. "Since you mentioned them."
"Suzie wants to be a doctor. Like Mum." Abby smiled at this, unprompted. "She's really good at it already, honestly. She still tries to take care of everyone, but it's... It's lighter now. Less like she has to. More like she wants to."
"That's an important distinction."
"Riley cut her own hair and it's a bit uneven and she loves it specifically because it's hers and nobody told her how to do it." Abby thought for a second. "Zoey draws constantly. Properly, not just... Not the way it was right after the sketchbook. She finished a whole mural for the school festival, after all."
"And Daisy?"
Abby's smile widened slightly. "Daisy's really happy. She wears her hair in two ponytails now, properly long. The first time you saw her after the move you didn't even recognise her, you kept looking around for Leeroy!" She smiled fondly at the memory. "She told me that was the best thing anyone's ever said to her, that you couldn't find Leeroy in the room anymore."
Dr Best was quiet for a moment, and something in his expression had gone slightly soft. "I remember that," he said. "I really did look right past her at first. I was searching the room for someone who wasn't there to be found." He shook his head slightly. "I told her I was sorry, and she said don't be, that not finding him was the whole point."
"She's right."
"She generally is, from what I hear." He picked his pen back up, but didn't write anything, just held it. "Abby. I want to ask you something, and you can take whatever time you need with it. How do you feel about your parents? Now. A year on."
She'd known this question would come, eventually, in some form. She'd had a year to prepare an answer that wasn't simply a smooth stone.
"I still think about the idea of them," she said slowly. "Suzie told me once, actually, a long time ago now, at Sacred Heart, that there isn't a right way to grieve. That you can grieve something that was never really there to begin with, and that's allowed too." She paused. "I think I grieve what they could have been. Not really who they were. I don't think I knew who they were, not properly. I knew who they were when they weren't paying attention to me, which isn't really knowing a person."
"That's a very precise way of putting it."
"I've had a year to work it out." She looked at her hands again. "I don't hate them. I used to think I should, after everything, after the chapel and the things the nun said, the way she tried to use my hate against me in confession. But I don't think I do. I think I just feel... Sad, mostly. Sad that they didn't get better. Sad that I had to be the one taking care of myself when I was small enough that I shouldn't have had to."
"That's allowed too."
"I know." She smiled, slightly. "You've told me that about six hundred times this year."
"I'll keep telling you for as long as it's useful."
The session ran its course the way it usually did, unhurried, genuine, the particular kind of conversation that didn't feel like an obligation anymore, more like checking in with someone who'd been steady and present through the worst and best of an entire year. Near the end, he asked the question he always asked, and she gave the answer that, a year ago, would have been unthinkable.
"How are you sleeping?"
"Really well, actually."
"Nightmares?"
"Sometimes. Less than before." A pause. "When I do have one, I usually end up in Mum and Dad's room, or Suzie's bed, or, well, there's always somewhere to go now. That's the part that's different. Not that the nightmares stopped completely. Just that I'm never alone with them anymore."
He wrote this down, and looked at her for a long moment afterward, and something in his face had the quality of a man who had been doing this job for twenty-three years and still, occasionally, found himself moved past his professional composure by exactly this kind of sentence.
"I'm glad," he said simply. "I'm really glad, Abby."
Michael picked her up at four-thirty, Bubble's most recent single playing at a volume that suggested he'd been listening to it on loop since the morning drop-off, and the rest of the car was already in full chaos, Riley recounting some elaborate playground drama with full theatrical commitment, Daisy interrupting to correct a detail, Suzie attempting, gently, to get the actual sequence of events established.
Abby climbed in and the noise wrapped around her immediately, warm and familiar and entirely unremarkable, and she found she didn't mind being interrupted mid-thought by Riley demanding her opinion on whether someone named Marcus had been justified in his playground decision-making.
"Marcus was not justified," Daisy said, with the confidence of someone who had clearly already relitigated this several times today.
"He absolutely was, you don't even know the full context—"
"Abby, settle it," Riley said, twisting around in her seat. "Was Marcus justified?"
"I have no idea who Marcus is," Abby chuckled.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only honest one I have."
Michael laughed from the front seat, the easy delighted sound that had become as much a part of this car as the music.
"Some things are unknowable, Riley. Let it lie."
"It's NOT unknowable, I just need someone with no stake in the matter to weigh in—"
The argument continued the entire drive home, expanding to include several more children Abby had never met and a dispute about lunch table seating that seemed, by Riley's account, to be the actual underlying cause of the entire Marcus situation. Abby leaned her head back against the seat and let the noise of it wash over her, warm and chaotic and entirely hers.
That evening, the house did what it usually did on Wednesdays, homework at the kitchen table, Michael cooking something that filled the whole ground floor with smell, Louella reviewing case notes at the counter with one eye on everyone simultaneously, a skill she'd developed with what Abby suspected was suspicious speed.
After dinner, once the dishes were cleared and Riley and Daisy had disappeared upstairs in the middle of some negotiation about whose turn it was to choose the evening's film, Zoey appeared in the living room doorway with something rolled under her arm.
"I want to show you all something," she said.
Everyone gathered, even Riley and Daisy, summoned back down by the specific quality of Zoey's voice, the one that meant this mattered. Michael turned the television off without being asked. Suzie sat forward on the couch. Louella came in from the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel.
Zoey unrolled it slowly, holding it up. It was five panels, meant to be displayed together, and even rolled and slightly creased from transport, the work in it was unmistakable, careful, considered, full of the warmth that had taken a year to fully come back after the fire had taken it once.
The first panel was Sacred Heart. Not unkindly rendered, accurate, the faded brick and the high windows, but small in the frame, distant, like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Five small figures stood at the gate, looking out, about to leave.
The second panel was the car. Five children and two adults, all of them singing, mouths open mid-note, a cartoonish rendering of a computer-voiced song winding visibly through the air above them like a ribbon.
The third was the attic, with the racing car bed, the canopy, the stars on the ceiling, all five of them in their own corners doing their own things, together.
The fourth was the kitchen, the morning chaos of it, waffles and a phone call and Michael spinning someone in his arms.
The fifth, the largest panel, central when the others were arranged around it, was all of them. Properly all of them. Michael and Louella in the middle, and the five of them arranged around them in a way that had no formal composition to it, just the casual closeness of a family photograph nobody had posed for, Riley mid-laugh, Daisy's two ponytails swinging, Suzie's hand on Abby's shoulder, Zoey herself sketched in at the edge, looking back at the viewer with an expression that was, unmistakably, happy.
Underneath the central panel, in careful lettering, she'd written something. We're all in this together. Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Riley, predictably, was the one to break it.
"That's so good, Zoey," she said, and her voice had none of its usual bravado in it, just simple, complete sincerity.
"That's so pretty!" Daisy was crying, quietly, the specific overwhelmed crying of someone who hadn't expected to see herself rendered with that much care, that much seen-ness, in a public mural that strangers would walk past every day.
Suzie's hand had found Abby's, holding it without comment. Michael had his arm around Louella, who was looking at the panels with an expression that had stopped performing composure several seconds ago.
"It's going up Friday," Zoey said, quietly. "Before the festival starts. The whole school's going to see it."
"It's beautiful," Louella said. Her voice wasn't quite steady. "Zoey, it's... I don't have the right word for how beautiful this is."
"I wanted people to know," Zoey said. She was looking at the panels rather than at any of them, the particular shyness she still carried sometimes around her own work, even now. "That we made it. That we're... That this is what happened. Not the bad parts. Just this. What it turned into. That we are in this together, after all. So, we might as well just try, eh?"
Abby looked at the central panel again. At all of them, arranged around two people who hadn't existed in their lives a year ago and now anchored the whole composition like gravity. She thought about the paper stars, still on the ceiling of the attic, twelve of them, lopsided and hers. She thought about a year that had started with a phone call Grant Best made at ten in the morning with trembling hands, and a clock face with five names beneath it, and a building with a whip and a fireplace that ate sketchbooks. She thought about how far away all of it felt now, and how close, both at once, the particular paradox of trauma that had finally found somewhere safe to live, no longer driving the car but riding along in the back seat, present but no longer steering.
"It's perfect," she said. "It's exactly right."
Zoey looked up at her. Something in her face, relief, maybe, or just the simple satisfaction of being understood completely, settled.
"Yeah?" she said.
"Yeah," Abby said. "We're all in this together. And we will keep trying, won't we?"
She looked around the room, at Riley's bravado finally cracked into something soft, at Daisy wiping her eyes and laughing at herself for it, at Suzie's hand still holding hers, at Michael and Louella standing together with their family's whole chaotic, hard-won, ordinary happiness laid out in five panels in front of them.
A year ago she had been a girl in a too-big chair, saying 'fine' to a man with a chess king on his keychain, because nothing else had felt safe to say. Now she had a mural with her face in it, hanging in a school hallway, telling the truth instead. S
he thought: we tried. We're still trying. We're going to keep trying, every ordinary Wednesday, for as long as it takes.
She thought it wasn't a small thing, to have built that. To have survived enough to get to try at all. She held Suzie's hand, and watched Riley wipe her own eyes while loudly insisting she wasn't crying, and felt the whole warm weight of her family around he, chosen, fought for, fierce and ordinary and completely, finally, hers, and let herself, for once, simply be happy without flinching, without waiting for it to be taken away. It wasn't going to be taken away. She believed that now.
That was the whole difference, in the end, between then and now: she believed it. Believed that they were together. Believed that they could succeed. But, most importantly, believed that life was worth the try.