Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

These days, Joel doesn’t pay much attention to his neighbours. Bill and Frank a few doors down are a decent sort. Bill’s a fucking prepper as bad as any he used to know back in Texas, but Frank’s nice, and keeps inviting him over for dinner. He goes occasionally when Frank throws a barbecue or something, something where he can sit in the corner of their backyard for a couple hours with a beer, eat some meat, and go home without talking to anyone.

Other than that, he doesn’t care much. The family across the street has a bundle of kids that all blend together and he avoids them like the plague.

It’s been a shit day. It’s raining and one of the guys on his crew called in sick with a bug, so sick Joel had to listen to him hurl for thirty seconds too long until he found the end call button. He’s cold, hungry, and his back hurts like hell.

When he sees a kid on his porch, he ignores them, going straight to unlock the door. “I’m not buyin’.”

“I’m not fucking selling anything,” comes a quick retort.

“Then get off my property.”

There’s a small, frustrated noise. “Dude, I’m trying.”

Then he realizes － the rotten spot. It’s off to the side and he doesn’t exactly spend a lot of time on the front porch, so he’s been ignoring it for months despite knowing better.

“Oh shit.” He turns and starts to walk towards the kid. “Are－”

“Back the fuck up!”

He stops.

Moving very deliberately, he takes a step back and reaches into the house to turn on the porch light. It’s already dark and the kid winces when the light comes on.

The girl, he realizes, and feels like an ass. She doesn’t know him from Jesus. He probably scared the shit out of her coming towards her like that.

“You fall through the board?” he asks.

She nods. She’s clutching something tight in one hand, and when she shifts slightly, it catches the streetlight.

Oh, good, the kid’s got a knife. Great. Because the thing Joel really needs today is to be stabbed by a kid with a knife and not enough brains to know when not to use it. The cherry on top of this shit sundae would just be an ER trip.

He forces himself to keep his tone calm, like he’s talking to a feral animal. “Can I come over there and help you get unstuck?”

It takes her a moment to consider it. “If you try anything, I’ll fuck you up.”

“I’m sure.”

He walks slower this time, crouching as far away as he can. She still eyes him warily, but he ignores it. She’s small, maybe twelve, and scrawny as hell. Big eyes that stare suspiciously at him as he pulls a pair of work gloves out of his back pocket and grabs the broken edge of the board.

“On three,” he says.

She nods.

“One… two…” He yanks it up and she jerks back, hissing in surprise and pain. He catches a quick flash of blood through her torn jeans before she scrambles away.

“Asshole!”

He stands up and heads back towards the door. “I catch you trespassin’ again, I drag you back to your parents by the ear.”

He slams the door shut before he hears a response. Doesn’t matter anyways. He doesn’t care about the kid. He just wants a shower, to eat whatever frozen dinner was on sale this week, and to go to bed.

Not his problem.

The kid is making herself his problem.

“Get off my property,” he shoots off as he unlocks the door.

She got smart, at least, and is sitting on the other side of the porch. He still hasn’t fixed the hole where she fell through. He could have. He has the time. But why bother? It’s not like he ever uses the porch for anything except walking up to the door.

He cares about the hole in the porch about as much as he cares about the chipping paint on the windowsills or the way some of the closet doors stick or the hideous orange the spare room is. He makes sure the foundation is solid and the roof doesn’t cave in. The rest, he can’t be fucked.

“Why are you home early?” the kid asks, bizarrely.

He turns with a hand on the doorknob. “You casin’ the joint or somethin’?”

“No,” she says. “Why are you early?”

“None of your business. Go home.”

She shifts, looking at her phone. “Just － just give me like ten minutes.”

“Pretty sure I told you to go home. In fact,” he says. “I’m pretty sure I said to stay off my property altogether.”

“God, you’re a fucking asshole,” she mutters and stands up. She shrugs on a backpack, then glances off past him and tugs the hood of her sweatshirt up. She passes him on her way off the porch and body-checks him with her shoulder.

Deliberately, he’s sure.

“Next time I call the cops,” he calls after her and she flips him off.

He goes inside. Shower, frozen dinner, bed.

The third time, he has such a fucking headache that when he sees the shape of a kid on his porch, he almost turns his truck around and drives back to the construction site.

“I’m callin’ the cops,” he threatens, speaking up to be heard over the wind. It’s a nasty evening, wet and windy and threatening to kick up into a real storm. He sent everyone home early, not wanting anyone still driving when it did.

“If I give you a dollar, can I stay for half an hour?”

For a second, he thinks he didn’t hear her right. It’s loud enough with the wind and rain to make it hard to hear.

“What?” he manages, finally turning to look at her.

She’s sitting against the house, sweatshirt pulled over her legs. She’s added a jacket this time, at least. Not one that looks waterproof or anything, but better than just the red hooded sweatshirt she’s always running around in. She still looks cold. And damp. The wind is blowing the rain sideways enough that she’s catching a decent amount of it.

“Like rent,” she says.

“I’m not rentin’ you my porch.” Joel runs his hand through his wet hair, feeling it drip down the back of his neck. God, all he wants right now is a hot shower and to not be dealing with this. “Kid, go home.”

Her phone screen turns on. “Twenty-eight minutes? For… uh, a dollar and eighty-seven cents?”

If he told her to get off the porch again, she probably would. She did the last time, and her voice is getting uncertain. She doesn’t know him. It wouldn’t exactly be hard to chase her off, if he put any actual effort into it.

God, he’s too tired to even bother scolding her.

He groans, crossing his arms over his chest. “Fine, I give. What is with the trespassin’?”

She gestures up and down the street. “Your house is the only one with a porch with a roof.”

“And?”

The kid shifts, looking between him and the stairs. “And you’re like never home.”

“And?” he says, a little less patiently.

“And,” she repeats, mocking, before her face falls the tiniest bit. It’s barely noticeable. She hides it well. “I － I just need to stay for… twenty-six more minutes.”

“Why exactly is that?”

She sighs in defeat. “I get out of school at three. My foster mother gets home at five.”

“You lose your key?”

“They won’t give me one yet.”

A particularly loud crack of thunder makes her wince.

Joel’s heart may be buried in a graveyard in Texas, but he doesn’t actually have any desire to see a little girl get killed by lightning.

“Don’t touch anything,” he mutters and opens the door. “You can stay til five.”

“What would I fucking touch?” she replies.

He slams the door instead of answering. She isn’t wrong, though. He’s never bothered to get any furniture or decorate.

He absolutely does not look out his bedroom window at five o’clock, watching a small figure bolt across the street a moment before a car pulls up.

It doesn’t rain for a couple weeks. Joel doesn’t notice much because it’s the end of September and he takes a few days off work to attempt to drink himself into a coma. It doesn’t work, the same way it hasn’t worked in twenty years, and he goes back to work still fighting off the hangover. He’s getting too old for this shit.

And he still feels like shit when he gets home.

“Go away,” he says, unlocking the door.

“Were you sick or something?” the kid asks. “Your truck didn’t go anywhere like all week.”

“No. It’s not raining. Go home,” he says and goes inside.

Five minutes later, he’s back out on the porch, leaning against the railing.

“Here,” he says, and hands a can of soda to the kid.

She looks shocked when she takes it and for good reason. He doesn’t even know what he’s doing. He should take a shower, eat something shitty, and pass out. There’s absolutely no reason for him to be talking to the little trespasser on his porch.

“What’s your name?” he asks, realizing he’s never asked.

“Ellie.” She pops the can and takes a long drink. “You?”

“Joel.”

“Where are you from?”

He sighs. He set himself up for this. It’s like feeding a stray cat － never a good idea. “Texas.”

“You’re early again.” She grins, bright and quick. “You got a date or something?”

“Pass.”

She rolls her eyes, then twists her head to look when the sound of a car passes the street.

And that’s when he gets a good look at the shiner on her face.

“Jeez,” he says. “Who’d you piss off?”

“Pass,” she copycats.

For really the first time, he lets himself look at her. She’s wearing the same red hoodie she’s been wearing every time he’s seen her and her brown hair is pulled into a messy ponytail. Almost everything she’s wearing looks a little too big for her, from the sleeves of her shirt poking out from under the sweatshirt’s cuffs to the jeans, cuffed over several times.

“How old are you?” he asks. “Twelve?”

“I’m fourteen.”

Older than she looks, then. She still has that baby softness to her cheeks, though, and she’s small for her age.

“So why don’t they give you a key?”

Ellie fiddles with the soda can tab, shrugging. “My foster mother thinks I steal.”

“Do you?”

“Depends who you ask.”

Not exactly an answer. Maybe it’s a good thing there’s nothing out here for her to steal.

It bothers him, though. When Sarah was fourteen, he had only barely started letting her stay home alone, and Mrs. Adler still looked in on her more often than not. Sarah called him overprotective, considering how many of her friends were already baby-sitting themselves. Maybe he was. It didn’t matter in the end, after all.

But that was twenty years ago. From what he’s seen, everyone’s more overprotective these days. He’d let Sarah ride around on her bike with her friends, or walk down to the corner store to buy a soda and chips. Nowadays it doesn’t seem like kids do much of that sort of thing.

Why is this kid always alone?

“Where’s the rest of them?” he asks, gesturing vaguely at the house across the street when she looks confused.

“Oh. Bethany has a job and all the other kids are little so they go to some afterschool program thing.”

“Aged out?”

She snickers. “Yeah, something like that.”

He’s just gonna ignore that.

Ellie’s phone chimes and she curses and scrambles to her feet. “I gotta go.” She hesitates before passing him. “Uh. Thanks.”

Then she’s gone, running down the stairs and across the street right as a car pulls around the corner.

“You got a bench.”

Joel leans against the railing. “It was free. Someone left it at a job.”

It wasn’t.

“It’s nicer than the floor,” Ellie says. “What job?”

“Construction. New house.”

“You make houses?”

He nods. He hasn’t unlocked the door yet and he’s not sure why. “I own a contracting company.”

“Huh. That’s pretty cool.” She looks over at the hole still in the porch floor. “How come you haven’t fixed that then?”

He shrugs. He doesn’t know how to explain to a fourteen-year-old that his soul died before she was ever born and now he doesn’t care about things like his porch.

“Do you like it? Being a contractor?” She snickers to herself. “That sounds like a wrestler name or something. The Contractor.”

Joel needs to be careful here. If he’s not careful, he’s going to smile at one of her stupid remarks. And if he smiles at one of her stupid remarks, she’s going to realize that he thinks her stupid remarks are funny. And if that happens, she’ll be impossible. It’s that whole mouse cookie story thing Sarah used to like.

“It pays the bills,” he answers finally.

“What do you like to do then?”

Not much, these days. He works, he eats, he sleeps, he drinks.

He shrugs again in response.

She rolls her eyes and drags her bag closer. “Okay… this is your fault, then.”

He has no idea what she’s talking about until she pulls a beat-up paperback book from her backpack.

Ellie sits up straight and clears her throat. “It doesn’t matter how much you push the envelope. It’ll still be stationary.”

He stares at her.

She giggles to herself and points at the cover. “‘No Pun Intended, Volume Too’ by Will Livingston. ‘Volume Two.’ Look, you get it? Too, like t-o-o.”

No. No, this is not going to be a thing.

“What did the mermaid wear to her math class?” Ellie leans forward, smiling expectedly. “…an algae bra. Like, algae bra!” She laughs even more. “I stayed up all night wondering where the sun had gone－”

“No,” he says, helplessly.

How the hell did his life lead to this?

“But then it dawned on me,” she finishes.

He shakes his head. “Those are awful.”

“You’re awful,” she says. She closes the book and puts it back in her back. “I’ll stop. But just know － you can’t escape Will Livingston.”

“Don’t you have better things to do than hang out on my porch?” he asks, curious. “Clubs or sports or somethin’?”

Ellie’s face shutters, just slightly. “Foster care doesn’t pay for that kind of shit, man.”

He regrets it immediately. He wasn’t trying to make her feel bad. It just doesn’t seem right she’s always stuck on her own. Surely someone’s worrying about her.

“There’s a library,” he says. “Don’t you get bored?”

She stands up and grabs her bag off the porch floor. “Look, my foster parents give me ten dollars a week because me getting free lunch embarrassed them. Lunch costs a dollar and sixty cents. That doesn’t leave a lot left for bus fare, okay?”

“Ellie－”

“I’ll find somewhere else to wait if it bothers you so much that I’m here.”

“Hey, wait－”

He reaches to stop her, but she slips away and before he can figure out exactly what he’s supposed to do here, she’s turning around the side of her house and disappears from view.

Shit.

Joel doesn’t see Ellie for days after that. He doesn’t worry about it.

He doesn’t.

He works and he sleeps and he eats. It’s exactly the same as his life has been for years.

On Saturday, he gets sick of watching sports on the couch and decides to go out for… something. He’ll figure it out when he gets in the truck.

And then he almost trips over something on the porch.

“Oh shit,” Ellie says, reaching out and grabbing her backpack. “Sorry, I didn’t expect you to be going anywhere. You like never do on the weekend. Where are you going?”

At some point, Joel thinks, he should probably question the kid about just how much she has memorized his schedule.

“Nowhere,” he says, making a decision as he speaks. “You wanna help me fix that board?”

Her face lights up. “Can I use a drill?”

“Absolutely not,” he says immediately and steps off the porch. “C’mon, you can help me carry stuff out here.”

She chatters while they haul shit out front. More questions, of course. Things like what kind of wood is it that he’s choosing, how does he know how to choose that kind of wood, why does sawdust smell kind of good. He ignores the sillier ones and answers the others with probably more detail than she actually wants. She either actually listens or pretends to listen convincingly enough to seem like she is.

By the time they get into the actual work, he’s pretty sure she’s actually listening. She definitely listens as he explains, nodding seriously as he instructs her on what to do. He gives her a very long safety lecture before he lets her touch the saw － and normally he’d be doing this with a band-saw, but no way is that happening －and she doesn’t even complain about it.

He takes over when he needs to, but he lets her do as much as the measuring, sawing, and sanding as possible. It’s a simple repair, really, and it’s one he could have done in less than an hour alone. It takes the two of them most of the afternoon to finish.

By the time they’re done, the sun is getting low and the light is fading orange. Joel gets things cleaned up and bring out a couple cans of soda.

“Good work,” he says, the words tripping awkwardly off his tongue.

Ellie beams at him.

“Here,” he says, and tosses a CharlieCard to her.

She catches it, and goes still. “I can’t－”

“It’s not a gift,” he interrupts. “Consider it wages for a day’s work.”

Her smile comes back, small this time, but just as real. “Guess that’s fair. You gotta pay for your child labour.”

“Didn’t I tell you to get off my property?”

Joel’s spent most holidays drunk for the last two decades. He spends Halloween with the lights off pretending not to be home. Tommy always invites him around for Thanksgiving, and he always makes a weak excuse to avoid it. This year is not exception. The end of November comes in cold, and it snows softly all day Thanksgiving.

He’s not drunk, but he’s working on it. Slower this time, not exactly wanting to recreate that hangover from September, but he’s very ready to be numb. He’s getting another drink when he realizes he left his travel coffee mug in the car. He debates leaving it, but he needs to wash it eventually. Might as well get it now.

When he opens the door, he doesn’t realize what the shape on the bench is at first. For a moment, he thinks he left something on it, a bag or something.

Then it hits him exactly what that shape is.

“Ellie?”

She shrieks and sits up so fast she almost falls off the bench.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” she demands. “Your truck’s not here.”

“It’s in the shop. I’m using a rental and －no, what the hell are you doin’ here?” he interrupts himself because that is the priority in this situation, clearly, and he is not losing control of this conversation. “Are you sleepin’ outside?”

She glances around. “Um…”

“Ellie, explain, right now.”

She wraps her arms around her knees. “Look, it’s fine.”

“It ain’t fine! You could have frozen to death.” He grabs her arm and hauls her ass off the bench. “Inside, now.”

She’s never been inside his house before and in another situation he’d think about it first. He’s never even met her foster parents. He’s just a strange man hanging out with their kid.

But it’s after eight in the evening and he just found her curled up on the bench on his fucking porch using her jacket as a blanket. Her arm is cold under his hand and he doesn’t really care how it looks to people who don’t know where the fuck their kid is on Thanksgiving evening.

The place is a bit of a disaster, he realizes almost as soon as he has her parked on the couch with a blanket around her shoulders. Hastily, he gathers the empty beer cans off the coffee table and gets them in the recycling.

“I thought you’d be gone,” Ellie says when he comes back into the living room. “It’s Thanksgiving.”

Thank God he wasn’t. He sinks into the recliner, rubbing his hands over his face. The sharp stab of fear has seriously sobered him up, but he still feels thick and stupid and incredibly unprepared to deal with something like this.

“Explain,” he says shortly.

She huffs. “Look, I had a plan.”

“Ellie. Where the hell are your foster parents?”

“Out of town.”

He sits up straight. “They left you alone?”

She shakes her head. “No, they’re not allowed to. But they’re going to visit family,” she says, with such venom that it makes him wince and it ain’t even aimed at him. “So they gave us back while they’re out of town. It’s called respite care.”

Joel inhales through his nose.

“They make me go back to the group home,” Ellie says, picking at her cuticles. “And I hate it. So I kinda just… left. I was gonna just come back here and sneak into the house. But fucking Bethany locked the window and if I broke in, someone would probably call the cops or something.”

He pinches the bridge of his nose. “So you are currently a runaway. You don’t think that group home will call the cops on you?”

She fidgets. “They’ll just call my caseworker and he doesn’t care. I’ve… done it before.”

“Someone has to be lookin’ for you.”

“Not really.” She blows out a breath. “I always come back, so…”

He doesn’t understand it. He believes her, or at least, he believes she’s not lying to him, but how could someone not care that she’s gone missing? Sarah was once three hours late coming home from a soccer trip because her bus broke down and he nearly had a stroke from the stress.

Ellie could have died and no one would have known. He could have found her cold, stiff little body in the morning if he hadn’t forgotten his coffee cup in the car.

It makes his chest go tight.

“Okay,” he says, sitting forward. “You are not sleepin’ outside. I’m drawin’ the line there. So either I can call your caseworker or whoever needs to pick you up…” Her face falls. “Or you can stay here tonight.”

It’s not a good idea. It’s really not. But he’s also not going to let her freeze on the street. And he’s not entirely convinced she won’t bolt again if he does report her. If she does, he doesn’t know where else that’s warm and safe she could land. Most things are closed for the holiday. A shelter? Would she even know one to go to? Considering her plan was to sleep on his porch, he doesn’t exactly trust her judgement here.

“Seriously?” she asks, looking hopefully at him.

“Your foster parents come home tomorrow?”

She nods.

“Alright then. Just for tonight.” He sighs. “Now get your shoes off the couch.”

It’s bizarre seeing a kid in this house, Joel realizes quickly. He moved up here after Sarah passed. An old work buddy had been looking for a partner for his contracting business, which Joel eventually bought out, and there was nothing keeping him in Texas anymore.

Sometimes it was easier, not being able to picture Sarah in every room.

Makes it strange to watch Ellie dump her untied shoes by the door and then start looking around the living room.

“You own a lot of shitty movies,” she comments, looking at his DVDs.

“How many of those have you even seen?”

She pauses. “They just look shitty.”

“Mhm.”

Her stomach rumbles so loudly that he can hear it from across the room.

“When was the last time you ate?”

She shoots him an oddly guilty look. “Lunch.”

She doesn’t sound entirely certain. Considering the holiday and her general lack of funds, he’s not sure when exactly where she would have gone for lunch if she wasn’t still at the group home. And even if she did eat then, that was eight hours ago and she’s fourteen. She’s probably starving by now.

“Well, lucky for you that I haven’t eaten either,” he says, and gets up to head into the kitchen.

He’s not surprised when Ellie follows close behind him. She’s nosy as hell.

His fridge is pretty pathetic. Beer, condiments, a couple of rapidly wizening apples. His freezer has a stack of frozen dinners and a few ice cream bars.

“Not a big cook?” Ellie asks.

“No.” He closes the freezer door and turns to her, taking his phone out of his pocket. “Chinese food or pizza?”

“Chinese,” Ellie says immediately.

He opens up a delivery app. He won’t act like he’s the most tech proficient person ever, but delivery apps means he doesn’t have to talk to anyone to order. He puts in his usual order and then passes the phone over to Ellie.

“Pick anything you want.”

She scrolls for a moment, then taps the screen a couple times. “Okay.”

He looks at the cart before sending it. She’s put in just a meal, rice and chicken. He hands his phone back to her. “Hey, I said whatever you want. I meant it.”

She looks at him, and he can tell she doesn’t believe him.

“Go on,” he prompts.

Finally, she taps a couple times more and hands his phone back. He glances at it and then throws in a few more egg rolls and some vegetables, because she still hasn’t ordered a single green thing. If there are leftovers, that’s fine by him. He suspects there won’t be many. It’s not his first time feeding a teenager.

While they’re waiting, he opens the fridge to grab some water. “Do you want somethin’ to drink?”

Ellie peeks around his elbow. “Can I have a beer?”

“Hell, no.” He hands her a soda.

The food gets there fast enough, considering it’s a holiday, and Joel slips the driver a couple bills for the tip. By the time he’s gotten plates and silverware from the kitchen, Ellie is standing in front of his DVD shelf again.

“Pick somethin’ if you want.”

“One of your shitty movies?” she shoots over her shoulder, grinning. She pulls one of the shelf, though, and deftly figures out his TV and DVD player.

Kids, he thinks. He still feels like he’s barely managing to make the damned thing work. Part of him misses the tube TV they had when Sarah was little, where all he had to do was turn it to channel three to make the VCR work.

It only takes him a second to realize what she’s picked. “Jurassic Park?”

Ellie hops onto the couch, folding her legs under her. “This is my favourite movie.”

Yeah, that makes sense. Ellie definitely seems like she’d be a dinosaur kid. Probably would have loved those singing dinosaur movies and watched them obsessively.

She grabs one of the cartons and is only barely convinced to use a plate. When she dumps some out, he realizes it’s the one she originally picked. She starts eating － with the chopsticks he was ignoring, he notes －and doesn’t seem like she’s going to touch any of the other food.

“Here, take an egg roll,” he says, putting one on both of their plates. He grabs a carton at random. “Do you like crab rangoon?”

“Never had it,” Ellie admits.

“Try one.”

He keeps adding food to her plate until she gets some of everything.

She eats like she’s afraid someone’s going to take the food away from her. The only people Joel’s ever seen guard their plates like that are guys on his work crew who were in prison. She eats everything she ordered and a good amount more, making him glad he ordered extra. She also talks with her mouth full and narrates most of the movie, telling him her favourite trivia and making sure he knows which scenes are the best, in her opinion.

It’s probably the nicest meal Joel’s had in years.

When the movie’s finished and the table cleaned up, Joel gets out his spare sheets while Ellie uses the bathroom. He makes up the couch as best he can with them and a couple thick blankets. His only real saving grace here is that his Texas bones still aren’t used to the Boston cold, even after over ten years here, and he’s got no shortage of blankets.

“Sorry I don’t have a spare bedroom,” he says as Ellie comes back into the room.

She yawns, stretching. “I’ve slept worse places.”

He hates that. But at least she’ll be warm and she shouldn’t be uncomfortable on the couch.

“Well, help yourself to anything you need,” he says, turning back the covers. “And I’m just upstairs so just holler.”

Ellie nods. She sits on the couch, curling her legs up and wrapping her arms around them. “Thanks. Can I ask you something?”

The way she says it pings his radar. Her tone is casual, but he doesn’t buy it for a moment. His messed up knee can’t handle standing in one spot for however long this takes, and he has a feeling it might take a bit.

He sits in the recliner. “Sure.”

“Why aren’t you with your family for Thanksgiving?”

He exhales. “My brother and I don’t talk much these days.”

“What’s his name?”

“Tommy.”

“Younger or older.”

“Younger.”

“Where does he live?”

“Couple hours away.”

“How come you don’t talk?”

“Long story.”

“Is it longer than…” Ellie looks at her phone. “Like fourteen hours? ‘Cause that’s how long you’re stuck with me.”

He rubs the bridge of his nose. The food, at least, has finished sobering him up, thank God. He never liked drinking much around Sarah. But Jesus, he wasn’t ready to be interrogated tonight. She’s quick and too clever by far. He’s not nearly smart enough for this.

“He… he has a lot of big dreams,” Joel says slowly. “Enlists in the Army right out of high school. Few months later, they ship him off to Desert Storm. It didn’t make him feel like a hero. He tries some other stuff and I’m always there to pick up the pieces until…”

Until Sarah.

“Until I couldn’t,” he says. “He moved out here and I followed him to keep an eye on him. But we had a big fight a few years ago and we’re not talking much these days.”

“Oh,” Ellie says.

“Why don’t you get some sleep?” he says. “It’s gettin’ pretty late.”

Ellie snorts. “Dude, it’s not even eleven. I’m not even tired.”

“Alright.” He tosses the remote over to her. “Put somethin’ else on, then.”

She turns on Netflix and scrolls for a few minutes before picking something.

Ten minutes later, she’s out.

Joel shakes his head and carefully sneaks the remote out of her hand, turning the television off. Ellie doesn’t stir.

Kids.

She doesn’t come around for a couple weeks and Joel worries until he sees her leaving for school one day, and she waves at him. When he finally can talk to her again, she rolls her eyes and explains she was grounded for her little stunt on Thanksgiving.

“Plus they’re making me go to their stupid church,” she says. “Every fucking Sunday and Thursdays for this bullshit youth group.”

“Not a fan?”

“No,” she says, in a bit of a strange tone.

Even though she hates it, it’s at least one day he doesn’t have to worry about her. Her foster parents have finally given her a key now that it’s December and cold, but she avoids the house as much as possible. Apparently she doesn’t get along well with the girl she shares a bedroom with. Brittany or Barbara or something.

She goes to the library a couple times a week now that she has bus fare. Ellie is a huge nerd, he realizes. Almost every time he sees her now, she’s carrying a book. Comics, especially this science fiction one she really likes, graphic novels, nonfiction about space and dinosaurs.

He doesn’t like that he comes home to find her reading on the bench on his porch early in December, shivering in that same too-thin green jacket.

“Why aren’t you at home?” he asks, unlocking the door. “You lose your key?”

“Julia doesn’t like me being in the house when she’s not there,” Ellie says. “If anything’s messed up when she gets home and I’m there, she blames me. Easier if I’m not.”

“Alright,” he says, unlocking the door. “You want somethin’ to eat?”

He lets her inside and she ends up sitting at his kitchen table drinking hot chocolate and telling him about her day while he does dishes.

Between youth group and the library, it’s only a couple afternoons a week. The next one, he leaves work a little early and opens the door right as she walks up onto his porch. Her face lights up with surprise before she hides a smile under sarcasm.

So that becomes a thing. He takes off early a couple afternoons a week. He thought his crew would be annoyed at first, but they’re strangely supportive. Those afternoons, he makes Ellie a snack and she does her homework at his kitchen table until the alarm on her phone goes off.

“Honestly I don’t know how you get so sticky,” Joel says one afternoon as Ellie gingerly shrugs off her sweatshirt.

Ellie snorts. “Man, me neither.”

She comes over to wash her hands in the kitchen sink.

His stomach sinks.

“Where’d you get that?” he asks, gesturing at her arm.

She looks down like she hasn’t noticed the bruise. “I dunno.”

“Ellie－”

“Do you have any more of those chips?” she asks cheerfully, drying her hands and putting her sweatshirt back on. “The barbecue ones?”

It looked like a handprint. Like someone grabbed her so hard it bruised.

It isn’t the first time she’s shown up with bruises. He knows she gets into fights sometimes with the other foster kids in the house, especially that Brittany or whatever girl, but that looked too big to be from another kid. It looked like an adult’s hand.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says when he doesn’t reply.

She’s not his kid. He can’t push her too hard.

“Alright,” he says finally. “You don’t have to.”

She talks, as cheerful as ever, and he tries not to think about the bruise.

After she goes home, he goes upstairs and looks into his spare room. It’s a mess of boxes and old junk. It’s not like he ever has guests. But it’s a nice room, under all the crap, even with the ungodly orange paint the previous owners chose. Good light from the big bay window, shares a jack-and-jill bathroom with his office.

It’d be a nice room, if there was someone to live in it.

The next day, Joel calls Henry into his office and is too preoccupied to realize how that looks until the kid starts sweating bullets.

“Hey, look, if this is about when I called off last week－”

“No, no,” Joel interrupts. He kicks a chair out. “I know you had Sam’s appointment. Saw your PTO request. It went well?”

Henry nods, sitting in the chair. “All clear for now.”

“It’s been two years now?”

“Yeah.”

Joel raps his knuckles against the wooden top of his desk, and Henry smiles.

He’s young － younger than Sarah would be now at twenty-five, and it’s so strange thinking that, when he can only picture Sarah as a teenager and Henry is an adult sitting in front of him. He tries not to think about it.

Joel hired him five years ago. No construction experience to speak of, but a strong recommendation from his former manager at the fast food place he worked at. He learns fast, works hard, and Joel pretends he doesn’t look at the kid and see himself thirty-some years ago.

“I wanted to ask you somethin’,” he says. “And it’s personal so you don’t gotta answer.”

“Alright,” Henry says.

“After y’all lost your parents, Sam was in foster care for a bit, yeah?”

Henry’s little brother is eight now, but he was only three when their parents died. Henry stepped up, Joel knows, and got custody just in time for Sam’s cancer diagnosis when he was four. Those two have been through way too much.

Joel doesn’t do a lot good these days. But he knows this job is good for them. There aren’t a lot of jobs a twenty-five year old high school drop-out can get that provide the kind of insurance they do. Or the flexible hours, or the paid time off.

“For a while, yeah,” Henry says. “I had to take some classes and shit before they believed I could take care of him.”

Henry was only twenty, but Joel was barely older than that when Sarah was born.

“Why?”

Joel hesitates a moment. “Did you ever… get a bad feeling about any of his foster homes?”

Henry shrugs. “White folks who rubbed me the wrong way, but I kept my mouth shut. It wasn’t gonna do Sam any good if I kicked off. He only stayed in two － no, three places. They needed to know how to sign, so.”

“Right.”

“You thinking about fostering?” Henry asks, a teasing tone to his voice. He doesn’t know about Sarah. Sam’s been to visit the job sites a few times, but Joel avoids all kid visit days. The rumour as far as he knows is he hates kids.

Joel rubs his hand over his jaw. “Neighbour’s a foster kid. I’ve been seein’ her around with bruises. Won’t talk about it.”

“Ah, shit.” Henry shifts, pulling his phone out of his pocket. “You know what, I still got Henry’s old caseworker’s number. She was pretty decent. No bullshit. Maybe she can help you out.”

“Thanks,” Joel says and he means it. “I didn’t even know where to start.”

Having Ellie around makes him think about Christmas.

Most Christmases since Sarah died, he’s been drunk. It’s a hard time of year. Too many memories. And if he thinks about her face on Christmas morning, he wakes up that night from a nightmare of her bleeding out under his hands. He wakes up from that nightmare most nights anyways, but Christmas is worse.

But Ellie makes it feel different. She asks him if he’s getting a tree and he says no, because he hasn’t had a Christmas tree in twenty years. And then she tells him that her foster mother doesn’t let them touch the Christmas tree.

So he gets a tree.

It’s not an amazing one, just a five foot plastic thing. He buys it secondhand from Goodwill, along with a few boxes of ornaments, and lets Ellie go crazy with them. She makes him put the star on when she’s done. Claims he’s tall, so it’s his job.

Later, when he’s alone, he sits on the couch in the dark, with just the lights from the tree on.

Somewhere in his storage unit is a box of ornaments. Sarah’s favourites, the ones she made in school. He hasn’t looked at them in decades, hasn’t even thought about them.

The thing he’s being bothered by most is that he finds himself wanting to get Ellie something for Christmas. She deserves it, but he doesn’t know what to get her, or, really, what he can get her. He doesn’t want to overstep or get her in trouble with her foster parents. He’s been keeping her CharlieCard topped up, but that’s not exactly a gift.

And then Tommy calls him on December fucking nineteenth.

And shit.

Joel waits for Ellie that day. It’s a Wednesday, so she barrels into his kitchen without knocking, throwing her backpack onto the floor.

“Today was fucking bullshit,” she starts to complain, then looks closer at him. “What… your face looks weirder than normal. What’s going on?”

He leans against the kitchen counter. “Do you remember where I showed you the spare key was hidden?”

“Fake rock by the shed,” she says, looking at him suspiciously. “Why?”

“Tommy called,” he says. “I gotta go see him.”

She crosses her arms over her chest. “For how long?”

“For Christmas. Til the twenty-sixth or seventh, probably.”

Tommy heavily implied twenty-seventh. Eight days. Eight days he has to spend pretending he can function like a human being, because he might be a shit human being, but if he loses Tommy, he’s destroyed his entire family.

Ellie clearly isn’t expecting that answer. Why should she, considering how he spent Thanksgiving?

“Right,” she says.

He feels like he’s fucking up and he doesn’t know why or how to fix it. He wants to be here, making sure Ellie is alright, making sure she has somewhere safe to land when things get too hard. He wants to give her a goddamn Christmas present and see her face when she opens it. He has to go to Tommy’s.

It feels, bizarrely, like going to work when Sarah was sick. He remembers her crying, miserable, and knowing he had to go to work anyways. He didn’t have paid sick time then, and with a seventeen year old Tommy living with them, he couldn’t miss a day of pay. It’s the same feeling of being pulled in two directions.

“Are you... are you gonna be okay?” he asks.

“Yeah,” she says, but she doesn’t sound okay. “They like to have us around at Christmas so they can show us off at church and shit. Don’t worry about it.”

“Ellie－”

“No, it’s fine.” She picks her backpack up. “Are you even gonna come back?”

“What?”

“You said you’re always following Tommy around cleaning up after him, so are you even coming back? Or you gonna move to… Buttfuck, Nowhere, or wherever the hell he lives?”

“Of course I’m comin’ back. What is wrong with you?”

“I’ve done this before, okay?” She moves closer without seeming to realize it, then freezes on the spot. “You feel bad for the poor little foster kid, so you’re nice for them a while. Then it stops being fun and you bail. So if you’re gonna ditch me, ditch me.”

“That’s not what’s happenin’.” It isn’t. He isn’t like that. He’s just… “Ellie, are you sure you’re gonna be okay?”

“Stop! Stop pretending to give a shit about me. I’m not her, you know.”

He can’t even follow it at first. It’s like the conversation has shifted in a completely different direction and he doesn’t even know which way is up.

“What?”

Ellie glances away from him. “I, uh. I Googled you to make sure you weren’t a creep. There was an article about Sarah.”

He loses the air in his lungs. “Stop.”

“I’m sorry about your daughter, Joel,” she says, stepping closer. “But I have lost people too.”

“You have no idea what loss is,” he snaps.

She recoils, then narrows her eyes. “Everyone I’ve ever cared for has either died or left me. Everyone － fucking except for you.”

She shoves him, hard, and he takes it.

She’s breathing hard, eyes bright with tears.

“So don’t bullshit me,” she demands.

“You’re right,” he says flatly. “You’re not my daughter. And I sure as hell ain’t your dad. So get out of my house. And maybe you shouldn’t come back.”

She inhales so sharply it’s almost a sob, and bolts, door slamming behind her.

Joel puts his fist through the wall.

Chapter Text

Tommy’s big news, the news that he used to give Joel the ultimatum that if he didn’t come up for Christmas, they weren’t going to ever speak again, is that his wife is pregnant.

“Congratulations,” Joel manages, and wishes he had insisted getting on a hotel room.

Tommy’s wife, Maria, is a smart, friendly woman who hates Joel’s guts.

Merry fucking Christmas.

Tommy wants to talk and Joel wants to drink. It’s a rough two days, made worse by the fact that he can’t stop worrying about Ellie.

She stole his phone a few weeks ago and texted herself from it to get his number. It was good knowing she could call him if there was an emergency. Then, somehow, she managed to convince him to download the stupid messaging app she uses. Eventually he realized her phone doesn’t always have money on it. That’s where most of her extra lunch money goes, he figures out. Sometimes he can track her day by the places she goes that have free wifi.

She hasn’t sent him a meme or a stupid selfie in days.

He didn’t expect to miss them so much.

He types up at least a dozen messages before deleting them without sending a single one. He wants to ask if she’s okay, if she’s staying warm, if she could ever be able to forgive him for what he said to her.

Most, he’s worried that she might do something stupid again.

Apparently, his sister-in-law is a bit of a workaholic. It helps, in that he doesn’t see her much the first two days he’s up there. It also means he has to spend more time with his brother, who apparently has taken time off work for the holidays. Joel got to Tommy’s after dinner on Tuesday, and by breakfast on Wednesday, he was ready to kill his brother.

By Friday, he’s so over this shit that he ends up taking apart the sink in Tommy’s laundry room solely for something to do. There’s a leak, which he’s mildly judging Tommy for not fixing already, but it’s not exactly urgent. He just need something to do or he’s going to lose it.

Tommy insists on making him lunch.

Joel’s not entirely sure when his brother learned to cook. Certainly not when he lived with them. Back then, the only thing Tommy could cook was ramen, macaroni, and dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets, and the latter two only because they were Sarah’s favourite foods.

It’s strange seeing him cook, and stranger that he’s good at it. If Joel didn’t know better, he’d say Tommy was even showing off a little.

For twenty years, Joel has eaten because he has to eat to stay alive. Sometimes barely that. Over the years he’s replaced plenty of meals with alcohol. He eats the same sandwich for lunch every day, whatever frozen shit was on sale when he went to the store.

He doesn’t remember the last time he had a homemade meal. The only meal he remembers caring about recently was… well. Thanksgiving.

“So I’ve been thinkin’,” Tommy says as they’re eating.

“Don’t strain yourself,” Joel replies without thinking.

Tommy stares at him.

It takes him a moment to realize why. He’s doesn’t think he’s made a joke around Tommy in… he couldn’t say. But he’s gotten used to bantering with a very sarcastic fourteen year old.

“I was thinkin’,” Tommy repeats slowly. “Maria’s takin’ this afternoon off. I thought I’d go pick her up and then we could go and get a tree today.”

The house is tastefully decorated, a lot of greenery and golds and creams. Joel sort of hates it. He keeps thinking about the chaotic tree in his living room, full of Goodwill ornaments and little paper decorations Ellie made at school when she probably should have been paying attention.

“Sounds good.” He takes a drink of coffee. “Be nice for you two to have some alone time. I’ll stay out of your hair, catch up on some work.”

It’s probably not what Tommy meant － it’s definitely not what he meant, but Joel desperately needs some time alone. He’s already wound so tight that Tommy doesn’t even push it.

He’s sitting on the couch wishing the soda he’s drinking was stronger when the doorbell rings. Someone trying to sell something, probably, and if he was at home, he’d just ignore it, but it’s not his house so he gets up with a grumble and goes to the door.

And his heart almost stops.

“Ellie?”

She looks up at him and makes a noise he’s never heard her make. “Right house,” she says and then she’s crying.

He’s not sure who moves first, or maybe he reaches for her at the same as she moves towards him, but she’s in his arms, face buried in his shirt.

“It’s okay,” he says, despite how not okay she seems. She’s absolutely fucking covered in blood and borderline hysterical. What happened to her? “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

“He －but I－” she babbles, words turning into whimpers.

He cups his hand around the back of her head, wrapping around her like he could shield her from whatever hurt her. Like he wasn’t too late to do that.

“Oh, baby girl,” he murmurs into her hair.

He doesn’t want to let her go, but he realizes eventually she’s shivering and freezing cold. She’s not even wearing a jacket.

He keeps his arm around her shoulders as he guides her into the house and down the hall to the bathroom next to the guest room he’s staying in. There’s better light in there for him to get a better look at her injuries.

“C’mere,” he says, giving her a boost onto the bathroom counter. “How did you get here?”

“You － you left a note on the counter,” Ellie says. “I didn’t know where else to go so I… I stole some money from you. Sorry.”

“That’s fine.” He holds her face in his hands. “I told you where the emergency money was for a reason.”

A reason he hoped she would never have to need.

She sniffles, winces. “I um. I bought a bus ticket. Kept my hood up and my head down. No one said anything.”

He doesn’t know how. She’s a fucking mess. There’s blood crusted under her nose right down her chin, thick and dark, cuts across her cheek and forehead, and, most disturbingly, she’s covered in splatter, splatter that he doesn’t think is her blood. His first thought was to get the blood off her, but he didn’t realize how bad it was.

“We should get you to the hospital,” he says. “Get you checked out by a doctor.”

“No,” Ellie protests, her voice going high and sharp. She grabs his arm, her fingers digging into it. “No, I can’t. Joel, please.”

“Okay, okay.” He’s not entirely convinced, but he’s never seen her that － terrified. That’s the only word for it. “Can we get you cleaned up a bit?”

She nods after a minute.

He runs the water until it’s warm, then dampens a washcloth and starts carefully cleaning her face off. Her nose has a deep cut across it, and it’s swollen and tender, but thankfully it’s not broken, as far as he can tell.

“What happened?” he asks when the blood is cleaned off her face.

Ellie takes a ragged breath, then unzips her sweatshirt. She’s wearing a light blue T-shirt under it, and it’s covered in blood splatter. She shrugs out of her sweater and tosses it away and Joel realizes her hands are so covered in blood that there’s a line where her sleeves stopped it.

He cleans them off for her, and doesn’t say anything when she cries.

“Do you want somethin’ clean?” he asks after a couple minutes.

“Yes,” she says quietly, desperately.

He does not know Maria well enough to be comfortable going into her and Tommy’s room normally, but he does it anyways. He’s sure she’ll forgive him, all things considered. He takes a pair of sweats and a t-shirt from her closet and escapes as quickly as possible.

Something makes him pause outside the guest room, though.

Ellie’s small, and Maria’s clothes should fit her fine.

Before he can change his mind, he grabs a shirt from his suitcase and brings everything into the bathroom.

“Grabbed you some stuff,” he says, setting the pile of clothes on the counter next to her. He hesitates before stepping out. “Are you hurt anywhere else?”

She avoids his eyes, gingerly lowering herself off the counter. Her shirt catches on it and rides up.

Her jeans are undone. No, not just undone. The button on her jeans has been torn off and the zipper is broken.

“Ellie,” he says, feeling like her name’s been punched out of him.

She looks down, flinches, and yanks her shirt down to cover it.

“Ellie, are you sure you don’t need to go to the hospital?”

“No,” she says. “Nothing － I stopped him.”

She swallows a couple times, staring away from him.

“Okay.” He hesitates. “I’ll be right outside.”

He gets to the door before she speaks.

“Joel?”

He turns. “Yeah?”

She hesitates for a long moment. “I －I need… my arm’s bleeding again.”

“Let me see.”

He’s expecting more cuts, like her face. Those look like she got hit in the face, splitting the skin open and bruising her up, and he used the first aid kit he found under the sink to put a few butterfly stitches on them.

He’s not expecting the bite on her arm.

It’s deep, deep enough that he can make out full imprints of teeth － human teeth － under the blood crusted around it. She winces when he touches it, and he apologizes through the cleaning, murmuring soft, soothing words.

When her arm is wrapped up in clean white gauze, he leaves her to change.

He tries to remember how to breathe while she’s doing that, and has mostly figured it out by the time she comes out of the bathroom. She’s wearing his shirt, a long-sleeved flannel one, over Maria’s t-shirt.

He guides her into the living room, sitting her down on the couch.

“I need to know what happened,” he says gently.

It’s clear she doesn’t want to talk about it.

She rubs her eyes with her sleeve. “There was a Christmas party at the church for youth group last night,” she says slowly. “I stayed late to help clean up after. It was just me and the youth paster guy.”

He hates this already. He’s not stupid. A bite on her arm, the bruises he saw everywhere her skin was exposed, the blood. It tells a story. It tells a story that no little girl should have to go through, and no part of him wants to hear it. But he needs to know as the adult here. If there are adult decisions that need to be made, he’s the one who needs to make them.

“Everyone likes him,” Ellie says flatly. “He acts nice. But he… he isn’t. He got mad when I said no. And then…” She inhales shakily. “There was a cake at the party and someone brought a knife to cut it up. I managed to grab it and… I made him stop.”

“Good,” Joel says and she looks at him, surprised. “He deserved worse.”

“No one will believe me,” she says. “No one － no one would believe me. I’ve gotten in trouble before. Julia still tells people I steal shit because I didn’t know she wanted us to ask permission before taking food.”

Jesus Christ.

He reaches for her and gently pulls her towards him. “I believe you.”

“I killed him,” she whimpers.

“Shh.” Joel cups his hand over the back of her head. “You did the right thing. It wasn’t your fault.”

He rocks her in place until she calms down, then keeps holding her. He’s never touched her this much, being careful to keep his distance, but he knows what feels right. He knows how he would comfort Sarah. And it’s keeping him from getting in his truck and going to Boston to find somewhere to bury a body.

He’s still holding her when the front door opens, and he hears the sound of footsteps in the hallway.

“Joel, get your ass out here,” Tommy calls, stomping snow off his boots. “I need your help gettin’ the－”

He comes around the corner and the sentence drops off in mid-air.

Ellie jerks away, scrambling to her feet.

“Who’s this?” Tommy asks.

Joel stands, gently pushing her back onto the couch. “This is Ellie. She’s my neighbour in Boston.”

Tommy looks between him and Ellie. “Kitchen. Now.”

He walks off.

“Wait here,” Joel says to her, leaving his hand on her shoulder for a moment. “I’ll be right in the other room.”

She nods, pulling her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. She looks so damn small, he can’t stand it. He hesitates for a long moment, wanting nothing more than to pull her back into his arms until she stops looking like she’s about to fall apart.

By the time he gets to the kitchen, Maria has joined Tommy in the kitchen.

Tommy doesn’t waste time beating around the bush. “Why is your twelve year old neighbour from Boston sittin’ on my couch lookin’ beat to shit?”

“She’s fourteen,” Joel says. She looks younger than she is, and she hates it.

Tommy looks like he’s considering fratricide. “Why is she here and what happened to her?”

Joel rubs his hand over his face. “She... she’s my neighbour’s foster kid. She came here for help.”

“Why－”

“Does she need to go to the hospital?” Maria interrupts.

Joel hesitates. He wants to say yes. He wants to get her stubborn little butt to a doctor this second, make her get her head checked out especially because the bruise on her forehead is scaring the hell out of him, but he knows her. He does not trust that if he tries to force her to go to the doctor, she won’t bolt. She’s scared and she’s already a runner. She ran to him this time and he wants to keep her here where he knows she’s safe.

But he worries.

“She said no,” he eventually says.

“Does she need legal help?” Maria asks, then raises her eyebrows at the surprise he can’t hide. “Lawyer,” she reminds him.

“Maybe,” he admits.

Maria nods. “Alright.” She opens the freezer door and takes out an ice pack. “Do either of you have a dollar?”

Tommy checks his pocket, then hands her a crumpled bill. “Why?”

“I am going to give it to － Ellie, I think I heard?” When Joel nods, she continues. “I’m going to give it to Ellie so she can pay me.”

Attorney-client privilege, Joel realizes as she leaves. Probably not exactly how it works, but it’s a nice gesture.

Tommy pulls out a chair from the kitchen table and sits in it, rubbing his hands over his face. “Am I gonna have to come up with bail money for you?”

Joel glances towards the living room for a long moment before sitting down. Half of him is still there, it feels like. He hates leaving Ellie alone right now.

“Fucker’s dead,” he says bluntly. “She showed up covered in his blood.”

“Jesus,” Tommy exhales. “And… why you? No offence, Joel, but I don’t get that.”

He gets it, despite how much it stings. He can’t even really explain why.

“She was annoying,” he says slowly. “She tells the worst jokes. Puns, awful ones. She likes dinosaurs and space. She uses an unholy amount of ketchup with her grilled cheese. She thinks I should plant a garden next spring because apparently my yard is boring and sad.”

It doesn’t explain anything. It feels like it explains everything.

Tommy nods. “Alright, then. Well－”

“Joel!”

He’s on his feet before he knows it, bolting into the living room.

Ellie is standing by the couch, pale as a ghost.

“What?” He rushes to her side, putting his hand on her back. “What happened?”

“She wants to make me go back.”

Maria holds a hand up. “That is not what I said.”

“It’s what you meant!” Ellie counters.

“Hey, hey.” Joel wraps his arm around her shoulders and pulls her in close. She’s shaking like a leaf and she tucks herself into his side like it’s second nature, glaring at Maria. The impact is somewhat lessoned by the cuts and bruises on her face. “Let’s slow down.”

After a couple minutes, he convinces Ellie to sit down again, probably only because he sits between her and Maria.

“I can’t tell anyone anything you told me,” Maria says to Ellie. “I could lose my license if I did. But no one knows where you are right now, honey.”

“Good,” Ellie mutters.

“They need to know where you are,” Maria continues like Ellie hasn’t said anything. “And we can’t just let you disappear from your foster home without telling anyone.”

Ellie hesitates for a long moment. “Could… could Joel get in trouble because of me?”

Maria eyes him, and he sees the exact moment when she decides to throw him under the bus. “Yes,” she says.

He doesn’t know if it’s true, and he doesn’t care. He doesn’t mind being the bad guy if it’s for Ellie’s sake. He’s not exactly fond of the idea of guilting her into doing things, but he wants what’s best for her.

Ellie looks at him.

“If I had it my way, you’d be at the hospital getting checked out, kiddo,” he says. He’s pretty sure she’s concussed, she’s favouring her left side something fierce, and he’s… he’s terrified she lied to him.

“Okay,” she says softly. “I can’t give you my caseworker’s number, though. I lost my phone.”

“That’s alright,” Joel says. “Actually, I had an idea.”

“Did it hurt?” Ellie asks.

Joel ends up calling the caseworker whose number Henry gave him. He fumbles his way through explaining. Ellie asked if he could use the speakerphone, but he struggles to hear it with his fucked up ear, so she just ends up leaning on his shoulder to listen as best she can.

The first thing the woman asks him is, “Is Ellie okay?”

After that, she asks a lot of questions. His phone number, his email, Tommy and Maria’s phone numbers, their address, Maria’s email. How long he’s known Ellie, questions about her foster parents, all sorts of things until his head is nearly spinning and Ellie slumping into him.

“I need to make some phone calls,” the caseworker says. “I will find out what’s going on and I will call you back as soon as I can. Ellie?” she says, and Ellie jumps slightly where she’s pressed against his shoulder. “I need you to stay put. Alright?”

“She ain’t goin’ anywhere,” Joel says firmly.

After he hangs up, Ellie doesn’t move. Her face is tucked against his neck, and she clenches her fingers in his shirt.

He jiggles her gently. “Hey. Think maybe you should get some rest for a while.”

Her breath hitches. “I don’t want to.”

He squeezes her arm. “I’ll come sit with you until you fall asleep. How about that?”

She agrees eventually. He leads her back to the guest room and turns down the covers. The bed is a high one, with storage underneath, and he has to help her up onto it.

“What happened to your ribs?” he asks as she’s settling down. He tries to say it casually, and fails.

“Got kicked.” She winces as she eases herself down. “I don’t think they’re broken. Just hurt like a bitch.”

How does she know what broken ribs feel like?

There’s a chair in the room, and he could pull it up to the bed. He sits on the mattress instead, close enough to put his hand on Ellie’s back.

“I’m gonna stay til you fall asleep,” he says, starting to rub her back. “Then I might have to talk on the phone some more. But I won’t leave the house without you, alright?”

Joel doesn’t know exactly what he can offer her. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen. But he knows what he can promise her in this moment. He can promise that he is not going to leave her alone right now and he can promise she’s safe.

She’s been so brave, and she’s been pretending she’s okay so hard. With his hand on her back, he feels that collapse.

He feels her fall apart.

She’s been sleeping fitfully for an hour or so while he’s been combing his fingers through her hair, when Maria taps her fingers lightly against the semi-open door.

“Can I have a moment?” she asks, voice barely audible.

He eases away from Ellie, tucking the covers up around her shoulders.

“Somethin’ wrong?” he asks, closing the door most of the way behind him.

“No, no.” Maria leans against the kitchen counter. “I didn’t want to bring this up in front of Ellie and put pressure on her, but Tommy and I are registered foster parents. We were talking about it and then…”

She gestures sheepishly at her midsection, a smile playing at the corners of her lips despite the situation.

“Tommy never said anything about that.”

She raises an eyebrow. “And you never said anything about Ellie.” She sobers after a moment. “Ellie told me a few things about her foster situation. She’s got some labels put on her that I don’t think seem very fair, and she’s fourteen. It’s harder for teens to find placements. They don’t… there’s a strong possibility that the system will take the path of least possible resistance here.”

He glances over his shoulder. “I’m not leavin’ her.”

“And I am not asking you to,” Maria says. “I’m saying you can both stay as long as you need. Understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, chagrined.

Maria nods. “Good.”

He clears his throat. “Where’d Tommy run off to?”

“Target run to grab a few things for Ellie.” Maria moves towards the fridge and starts taking things out. “I told him to bring home dinner, too.”

Joel very carefully does not comment on the fact that she’s currently making a roast beef sandwich. Even he’s not quite that stupid.

He also says nothing about her spreading grape jelly on it.

They talk while she eats. Nothing in particular, just the sort of basic small talk that Joel still absolutely hates. He’s out of practice. He’s trying anyways. The last thing Ellie needs is to wake up to a bunch of yelling or tension.

Not long later, Tommy comes in with an armload of bags.

Joel goes over to help him.

“Here, this one’s all for Ellie,” Tommy says, passing it over.

“I’ll go wake her up for dinner.”

Ellie fell asleep with the lamp on. It isn’t very bright, barely more than a night light, and he was worried about her waking up and not knowing where she was, so he left it on. The light falls soft across her face, casting shadows that make the bruises look even darker.

Her cheeks still have tear tracks on them.

He crouches down next to the bed. “Ellie,” he says.

She stirs, and for a moment he thinks everything’s fine. Then, suddenly, panic flashes against her face. Her eyes fly open and she shoves herself up on one elbow. She gasps in pain, hand flying to her side.

“Careful, careful.” He reaches for her.

And she flinches.

Joel freezes. “Ellie?”

She looks up at him and her breath shudders out. “Fuck.”

After a second, she lays back down, shoving her face halfway into the pillow. She squeezes her eyes shut, breathing still unsteady.

“Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, baby, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Ellie reaches out blindly and grabs for his hand. When he catches her fingers in his, she pulls his hand towards her and presses their joined hands against her forehead.

“You’re okay,” he says. He moves his hand just slightly so he can stroke his thumb against her forehead, smoothing the little wrinkle between her eyebrows. “You’re alright.”

She nods tightly.

They sit like that until her breathing calms.

“There’s food,” he says eventually. “And Tommy got you some stuff.”

“He did?”

“Mmhm. Think you could come eat something?”

She yawns. “Do I have to?”

“I’d like it if you tried,” he says.

It takes a moment more, but eventually Ellie nods and starts to sit up, more carefully this time. Joel grabs the nightstand to pull himself up, knees popping the whole way.

“Dude, you sound like Rice Krispies,” Ellie says.

“Fifty-six years old, you little shit,” he retorts.

She keeps close to him as they head into the kitchen, nearly stepping on his heels.

“Here,” Joel says, nudging her over to the table where the bag of stuff Tommy bought her is sitting. “That’s for you.”

She tips it towards herself, frowns, and then pulls out a shirt. “Wait, these are new.”

“I wasn’t sure on your size,” Maria says. “I told Tommy to get a few options. You use whatever works best for you.”

Ellie moves things around a moment, then pulls out a toothbrush and a box of toothpaste. “I － I’ll be right back.”

She comes back a few minutes later smelling strongly of mint.

“Put some socks on,” he says instead of commenting.

Tommy passes him a stack of plates. “I think this once we could eat in the living room, don’t you?”

“Our mother’s rollin’ in her grave hearin’ that,” Joel says to Ellie.

He’s grateful, though. Meals have been somewhat… tense. He really doesn’t want Ellie to have to deal with that right now. He’s also glad Tommy grabbed a couple of pizzas for dinner. Ellie’s a fucking cheese fiend, in any form. He’s started keeping those horrible plastic cheese slices in the house solely so she can have a grilled cheese whenever she wants.

Tommy flips around until he finds an old Christmas movie on the television and it would be nice if not for the bruises on Ellie’s face and how worried about her Joel is.

She eats a slice and a half, then puts her plate on the coffee table. He would push, normally. He knows how much more she could eat than that. But she looks exhausted despite the nap and if that’s all she can handle, that’s fine.

He pretends not to notice her inching closer on the couch. He pretends to, very casually, put his arm across the back of the couch, and ignores the little peeks she keeps giving him before finally leaning her head against his shoulder.

She’s asleep before the next commercial.

She sleeps right through Tommy putting away the leftover pizza, right past the end of the movie. Joel’s just starting to think about getting her to bed when it switches over to the news.

“Boston preacher found dead in church,” the newscaster says, and Tommy turns the television off.

Ellie stirs against him. “Wassat?”

He looks at Tommy, and makes a split-second decision. “Nothin’,” he says. “C’mon, let’s get you to bed.”

Tomorrow, he mouths at Tommy.

He snags Ellie’s bag from the kitchen on their way by. He’s not sure what else is in there, but she might want it close. She doesn’t have any of her stuff here and this is the next best thing.

He helps her up onto the bed again and gets her tucked under the covers.

“You get some sleep now.” He brushes the stray hair back from her face. “I’ll be in the livin’ room on the couch if you need anythin’, alright?”

Ellie’s eyes open and only his hand on her shoulder stops her from shooting up. “Wait, am I stealing your bed?”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“Well, I’m gonna,” she mutters. “You always bitch that your back hurts when you fall asleep on the couch.”

God, she’s the most observant kid he’s ever met. A curse and a blessing, his mother would say.

“Maria and Tommy’s couch is a lot nicer than mine,” he says. “Go to sleep.”

She’s struggling to keep her eyes open already, but she looks up at him. “Could… could you sit with me again for a little bit?”

“Course.”

As soon as he’s settled, Ellie grabs his hand again.

“Sorry,” she says, rubbing her eye sleepily. It’s a much younger gesture than he usually catches her making. “I didn’t sleep at all last night.”

He doesn’t even want to think about her night, or where she spent it. He’s hoping bus depot and not somewhere on the street, freezing and terrified.

“You sleep all you need,” he says.

Joel wakes up the next morning to a full coffee pot, one of the most beautiful sights he’s ever seen. Like he does every morning, he nearly burns his mouth off with the first half of the mug, and by the time Maria comes into the kitchen, he’s almost feeling human again.

“No,” she says, and it takes him a second to realize she’s on the phone. “Absolutely not.” She’s quiet for a moment, then, “Email me the details.”

She ends the call, and tosses her phone onto the counter.

“Everythin’ okay?” he asks cautiously.

“The preacher’s dead,” she confirms. “They found his body. Ellie’s foster parents saw the news last night and finally put two and two together and reported her missing.”

“Last night?” he repeats. “She’s been gone for a hell of a lot longer than that.”

“I know.” She takes a mug out of the cupboard and pours herself a cup of coffee. “Her caseworker didn’t even report it. That woman, Tess? She called him and he just handed Ellie over to her. She’s the one who’s been talking to the police.”

“Good riddance.”

“They found her bag and her phone at the church,” Maria says. “They want her to go back to Boston to talk to them.”

“No,” Ellie says from the doorway.

Joel almost drops his mug turning towards her. “When did you wake up?”

She ignores him. She’s sheet white, and her hands visibly shake until she hides them by crossing her arms across her body.

“I’m not going back to the Howards,” Ellie says. “I’d rather go to fucking jail.”

“You are not going to jail,” Maria says immediately. “And you’re not going back to those… people.”

“I didn’t even want to go to church,” Ellie says hollowly.

And Joel breaks.

He pulls her into a hug, and she goes with a breath that sounds like she’d forgotten how. He gives her as long as she needs to lean against him, only letting go when she pulls away to go sit in a chair at the kitchen table.

“So what happens now?” she asks.

Maria pulls out the chair next to her and turns it so she can sit facing Ellie. “I said that if you were okay with it, I would take you to our local police station and we could talk there. Is that okay with you?”

“I guess.”

“Alright.” Maria glances at him for just a second before focusing on Ellie again. “Then let’s set some rules.”

“Rules?”

“Rule, really. Don’t talk to cops.”

Ellie looks surprised.

“The only things you say are ‘I am invoking my right to a lawyer’ and ‘I am invoking my right to stay silent’,” Maria says firmly. “If they ever want to look through your phone or come inside, you ask to see the warrant. And you call me or another lawyer before you say anything.”

“O-okay,” Ellie says, uncertain.

Maria touches her stomach. Joel doesn’t think she realizes she’s doing it. “There are things you won’t have to think about. The police aren’t going to look at you and immediately see a threat because of your skin colour. But they are not your friends and you are not immune to getting hurt by them. Do you understand?”

Ellie hesitates. “I’m trying to.”

“Good,” Maria says. “So, if you’re ever pulled over or something, you use those manners I know you have. ‘Yes, sir’, ‘no, sir’, all that. You keep your hands in sight and if they tell you to get something out of your bag or your pocket, you narrate what you’re doing. No sudden movements. No jokes. None of that.”

“Right.”

“When we go to the police station, they’re going to ask you uncomfortable questions,” Maria says. “Personal ones, probably. They might ask about your history. If you’ve dated anyone before. They might try to blame you. But it is not your fault.”

A tear slips down Ellie’s cheek. She swipes at it, and nods, just slightly.

“I’ll tell you what questions to answer,” Maria continues. “And I will stop them if they cross a line. I just want you to be prepared for that because it’s probably going to be hard. Sometimes the police are awful to victims of sexual violence.”

The words make the bottom of Joel’s stomach drop out. He knew, of course. It’s different to hear it said so bluntly about the little girl sitting in front of him. She’s wearing Christmas pajama pants covered with penguins wearing Santa hats, his shirt, and no socks, even though he’s pretty sure she was wearing them when she fell asleep. Her bruises have gotten darker, and he’s immensely aware of how breakable she is.

Ellie picks at her cuticles. “Is it － is it because of what I did to him?”

“No,” Maria says, firm. “It’s because they’re assholes. If you had fought less, they probably would have asked why you didn’t try harder to stop him.”

Joel’s stomach twists.

Ellie glances over at him. “Can Joel be there?”

“I’m not sure,” Maria answers honestly. “I can be there as your lawyer and there will probably be a social worker there. But they might not let Joel stay.”

Ellie looks away, picking at her cuticles. “Would… would it be okay if you weren’t there?” she asks, and it takes him a moment to realize she’s talking to him.

He moves close enough to press his hand against her shoulder. “Whatever makes you comfortable.”

He understands, from her jeans, from her bruises, from the bite on her arm and the few words she said, what happened. He also understands that it’s different knowing that he knows the broad strokes and her having to explain in detail exactly what happened.

If she wanted to tell him, he wouldn’t have it any other way. But she shouldn’t be forced to tell him. She shouldn’t be forced to rip open a wound that’s barely stopped bleeding at all.

“Can I take a shower?” she asks Maria.

“Go ahead. Do you want me to show you where anything is?”

“No, I’m okay.”

As soon as she disappears, so does Maria’s smile. She slumps forward, rubbing her face with her hands.

“You alright?” he asks.

“I really thought about censoring that talk,” she confesses. “She’s a little white girl. Does she need to hear it all? But shouldn’t she know?”

Joel sits next to her. “Gave Sarah the same talk,” he says. “She was… twelve － no, eleven. She was tall for her age. People thought she was older. She had nightmares for weeks.” He looks down at his watch. “Just ain’t fair in general, I reckon.”

“No,” Maria says. “It isn’t. None of it is. I probably shouldn’t have even let her shower. I have － I have her clothes in a bag. I should have made her go to the hospital and have an exam done. Have them take samples in case there was － was evidence..”

“So why didn’t you?”

“Because she’s barely holding it together,” Maria says frankly. “And I need her to trust me if I’m going to protect her.”

He knows the feeling.

Joel offers to go to the station with them, but Ellie says she’d rather do it herself. As soon as she’s gone, he plans to spend the morning roaming aimlessly around the house. Instead, Tommy corrals him into last-minute Christmas shopping. When Joel protests that he doesn’t want Ellie to come back and not know where he is, Tommy wordlessly － and yet, mockingly － holds up his phone, and then texts Maria.

His phone lights up right away and he snorts, and holds it out so Joel can see.

I want to go to the mall after, the message says, immediately followed by. This is Ellie, by the way.

Joel wrestles the phone away from Tommy and sends back. Figured as much. After a second, he adds. This ain’t Tommy.

No shit? she texts back. Okay, gotta give Maria her phone back bye

Good luck, he sends back.

The mall on December twenty-third might just be Joel’s personal idea of hell. Thirty minutes in, he wants to kill someone.

Worse, he realizes Tommy was right. He didn’t actually buy a gift for… anyone. And with everything Tommy and Maria are doing for him and Ellie, he probably should get them something. And he does want to get Ellie something. He wanted to before, but he absolutely does not want to see her not opening any presents on Christmas morning.

He has to make a run out to the car just so he can put a load of bags in the trunk.

It’s been a couple hours when his phone vibrates.

WHERE R U, from an unknown number.

Belatedly, he realizes he’s never actually added Maria as a contact in his phone. He does it, guiltily, and then sends back a picture of the store he’s closest to.

Maria said we could get food meet us at the food court, Ellie shoots back.

Bossy, he replies, but he’s already moving.

Ellie’s been crying. He can tell right away. But she grins at him, so he doesn’t say anything.

“Hi, I’m starving,” Ellie says and grabs his arm.

“Hi, starving, I’m Joel,” he replies automatically.

“Zero out of ten,” she says without pausing. “Awful. Can I get a pretzel?”

“Sure, but you need some real food, too.”

She rolls her eyes, but there’s nothing behind it.

Funny, the things that don’t change. Twenty years ago, he was having this same conversation in a mall with a teenage girl. Malls might be dying like they say, but for now, it feels so familiar.

Ellie’s still not sure how much food she’s allowed to get. She’s hesitates, and he remembers what she said about her foster mother. Then he orders extra, more food than he could eat.

When they meet up again with Maria and Tommy, he realizes they’ve both done the same. Maria fibs that her appetite is weird from the baby. Tommy doesn’t bother, just throws a cookie at Ellie. Joel has to stop her from nailing him a tomato and turning it into a food fight.

She steals Joel’s food and he pretends like that wasn’t his plan in the first place.

After, they split up again. Joel drove them to the mall, so Tommy can hitch a ride home with Maria if they want to leave sooner. He doesn’t have anything else to buy, but he wouldn’t mind distracting Ellie for a couple hours.

“Do you need anythin’?” he asks her. She’s wearing some of the clothes Tommy bought her － and one of his shirts, he notes.

Ellie glances at him, fiddling with her fingers. “You guys have already bought me so much stuff.”

She sounds guilty, and Joel immediately wants to destroy every person who has ever made her feel like that.

Of course, that’s when his phone rings.

“Shit,” he mutters, checking the caller ID. “It’s Tess.”

The mall is loud enough that he’s already struggling to catch everything.

Ellie grabs his arm and pulls him through a set of doors into a miraculously quiet hallway.

“Thank you,” he says sincerely before answering. He’s never told her about his hearing, but of course she’s noticed.

They exchange the normal niceties, but Tess doesn’t linger on them. He appreciates that. For some reason, she seems amused they’re at the mall.

She cuts to the chase. “The emergency custody order has been granted. We’ll have to revisit it in the new year, but Ellie is good to stay with you guys until then.”

Ellie tugs on his sleeve. “Can you ask her about my stuff?”

“Was that Ellie?” Tess asks. “Would it be alright if I talked to her for a moment?”

“Sure.”

He passes the phone over and Ellie wanders a little down the hallway, keeping her voice low. He gives her as much space as he can. She’s allowed privacy when she wants it.

She talks to Tess for a few minutes, then hands the phone back to Joel. He wraps up and says goodbye to Tess, tucking his phone away.

“She’s gonna get my stuff,” Ellie says, looking incredibly relieved. “I was scared they’d just turf it all. Can I use your phone later to email her a list?”

“Course you can,” he says. “Can we talk though?”

She takes a step back. “What?”

He did that, he realizes sickly.

“Nothin’ bad,” he tries to reassure her. “Just wanted to make sure you understand what’s goin’ on.”

“Oh,” she says cautiously.

“Maria and Tommy are gonna have emergency custody of you,” he says. He passes his fingers over the face of his watch. “Tess helped me figure out the application, but it’s a long process and I’ll probably have to take some classes and stuff before they even decide if I could or not.”

Ellie stares at him. “Application?”

“To － to foster,” he says. “It just takes a while.”

“But you want to － you want me to live with you?” she asks.

“Yes. If that’s what you want.”

She launches herself at him, hard enough to knock him back into the wall.

He could not care less.

“They might say no,” he warns against her hair. “And I don’t know how long it’ll take.”

“S’okay,” Ellie says into his shirt.

She’s shaking a little.

He strokes her back, long, slow touches like he did when Sarah was small and had nightmares. “You’ve never seen the upstairs of my place,” he says, his voice coming more unsure than he expected it to. “There’s three bedrooms up there. I use one of ’em as my office, and the other’s just been storage. I started cleaning it out a little while ago, though.”

“You did?”

“Mmhm.” He lets himself press a kiss against her forehead, something he hasn’t done before, but it feels right in this moment. Her breath catches, a little, but she presses closer into him. “I mean, you can have either but I think you’d like that one. It’s bigger and it gets more light. You can paint it if you want. Pick out new furniture.”

He keeps talking and pretends not to notice the wetness soaking into his shirt.

In theory, he’s sleeping on the couch and Ellie’s taken the guest room. He convinced her to put her things in the closet and the dresser in an attempt to make her more comfortable. He offered to move his things out, too, but she said it was fine.

In practice, he fell asleep sitting up against the headboard last night, and only ended up on the couch for a few hours. His neck is still sore.

Maria goes to bed early and Tommy disappears into what he calls an office, but Joel suspects may be closer to a man cave. He has a vague air of scheming to him, but he also owns a house and is married, so Joel is less worried about it than he was when Tommy was sixteen.

Ellie wanders in from the kitchen with a slice of cold pizza in her hand.

“How on earth do you have room for that?” Joel asks. They just finished dinner an hour ago, and Ellie ate more than him or Tommy.

She shrugs and takes a bite. “I’m kinda always hungry,” she says around it. “Always pissed Julia off. S’why she started locking the fridge at night.”

Joel has to breathe slowly through his nose for a moment. He can’t, he reminds himself, drive the two hours back to Boston just to chew out his neighbour.

“Well, you eat as much as you want,” he says, as calmly as he can.

In theory, Joel shoos her into bed a couple hours later, makes sure she’s comfortable, and leaves her to sleep in the guest room.

In practice, he wakes up when her hand touches his shoulder, takes one look at her face, and moves to make room for her.

He listens to her whisper about the nightmare she had, about the memory of weight on top of her and the feel of blood on her hands, and he wishes more than anything he could have been the one to carry this burden for her.

Joel had forgotten how much Tommy loves Christmas. It’s natural, he supposes, when they haven’t spent the holidays together in twenty years. Tommy must have told him about holiday plans over the years, but he can’t remember any details.

At this point, he’s not entirely sure who’s suffering more, him or Ellie. He, at least, has coffee. Tommy forced a splash of peppermint coffee creamer on him, which is frankly, disgusting, but it’s still coffee.

Ellie leans on his shoulder. “Is that good?” she asks, sniffing suspiciously at it.

“No,” he says bluntly. “Stick with that.”

Tommy gave her a mug of hot chocolate with a truly ridiculous amount of whipped cream on top. Plus chocolate sprinkles.

Ellie sips at it very cautiously. “Is he always like this?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

Tommy flips him off. “I can hear you two. See if I feed you now.”

Joel looks at Ellie. “iHop or Waffle House?”

“Waffle House,” she says immediately. “Did you know FEMA has a Waffle House Index? Basically, if Waffle House is closed, you’re fucked.”

He did know that.

“That so?” he says.

“Yep,” Ellie says. She shifts on the barstool, and he eyes her warily. She sits like a heathen, all pretzeled up with her legs folded into shapes that don’t look remotely comfortable. He’s half-convinced she’s going to tip right off and crack her head open on the floor.

Maria joins them in the kitchen a little while later, pouring herself a mug of coffee.

Tommy goes towards the fridge.

“If you put candy cane coffee creamer in the one cup of coffee I get a day, I will divorce you,” she says calmly.

He makes the wise choice to abandon it.

Breakfast is damned good. Tommy’s made homemade breakfast sandwiches and hash browns. Ellie fills up on both, but she also takes a healthy portion of fruit salad without Joel even saying anything.

Joel’s given her fruit a few times as a snack, and she always eats it without complaint. He thought it was just a kid thing, remembering how much money he spent on berries alone when Sarah was little, but… she looked surprised to see it when Tommy brought the bowl out.

He sneaks extra pineapple off his plate onto hers when she isn’t looking.

“What are your plans for today?” Tommy asks Maria.

She’s eating a little slower, and she’s got some scrambled egg whites on her plate instead of the fried egg the rest of them got. Sarah’s mom struggled with greasy food in her early weeks, Joel remembers. “I need to go into the office for a few hours.”

“Guess that means it’s just us three,” Tommy says lightly.

Ellie’s face falls, just the slightest bit. Joel wouldn’t even notice if he didn’t know her face so well by now.

When Maria leaves, Joel starts to gather up their dishes. “Ellie, honey, help me clean up, will you?”

“Okay,” she says easily.

They have a dishwasher, so it’s quick work.

“Was that my fault?” she asks eventually. “Like is the work… my crap?”

“No,” Tommy says. He sits on the other side of the island, leaning forward with a smile. “It’s not about you, sweet pea, I promise.”

The nickname makes something warm and achy in Joel’s chest, all at the same time. He appreciates everything Tommy is doing for them, taking Ellie in to keep her safe, the way he’s looking out for her. But he knows Tommy would do that for any kid in need.

Joel wants… he wants more than that.

He wants a forever kind of thing here.

Tommy’s face goes more serious. “This time of year is hard for her. She lost her little boy when he was two. So she just needs some alone time now and then.”

Jesus. Any age is too young to lose a child, Joel knows all too well, but two is… tiny. Just a baby, really. Sarah was barely talking at two. He can’t imagine that.

“Shit,” Ellie says softly.

“So,” Tommy says. “What I’m wonderin’ is if you have any plans today.”

“Me?” she repeats. “Oh, yeah, tons of ‘em. Hanging out with my many, many friends.”

Sarcastic little shit, Joel thinks fondly.

Tommy’s plans, apparently, include making more cookies than any of them could ever eat. Ellie’s not much of a baker, they learn quickly, and is swiftly taken off actual baking duty, but she’s having a blast decorating them.

Joel has to step out several times to take calls, send emails. Ellie looks at him anxiously the first time he leaves, but doesn’t say anything. She’s safe with Tommy, and he’s careful with her. Doesn’t crowd her, makes sure not to box her into corners or anything.

“That was about me,” Ellie says quietly after a particularly long phone call.

Joel wraps an arm around her shoulder and pulls her in to lean against him. “And I am just fine with that. Now show me those zombie gingerbread men you were working on.”

“Okay, one, they’re infected,” Ellie corrects. “Cool zombie shows don’t say the word zombie. Keep up, Joel.”

“Yeah, Joel,” Tommy echoes. “Keep up.”

He should probably be worried about them teaming up on him. He’s just glad Ellie’s distracted. One day, he’ll convince her she’s worth caring about.

By the time they’re done, Ellie has probably eaten more frosting than she’s decorated with. Joel has fully lost track of how many cookies she’s eaten, and she’s easily consumed twice as much frosting. She’s completely ruined her appetite for lunch and he doesn’t even bother trying to make her eat anything. She steals things that she thinks looks good off his plate while talking so fast he struggles to keep up.

When she complains her stomach hurts, he jumps on it and makes her lie down on the couch. She’s still healing, still a walking bruise, still probably concussed. She isn’t complaining about a headache, but he’s pretty sure she’s still fighting one. He’s been giving her ibuprofen to help with the pain and the cookie decorating kept her mostly still, sitting at the kitchen island, but he’s still worried she’s pushing herself too much.

“I’m not even tired,” Ellie protests, but stretches out on the couch at his urging.

“Rest is still important.” He hands her the pillow he’s been using, then lays his blanket over her, tucking it around her feet because they’re always freezing. Then he hands her the remote. “Find something to watch, then. I’ll just be in the kitchen.”

He closes the blinds and turns off the light, leaving the living room soft and dim.

“Joel?”

“What?”

Ellie gives him a shy smile. “That was fun. I’ve never really done anything like that.”

He goes back over and makes sure the blanket is pulled up around her shoulders, then leans down and kisses her forehead. “I’m glad you had fun.”

The kitchen looks like a cookie tornado hit it and Joel can’t help chuckling.

“How she doin’?” Tommy asks.

“Better, I think,” Joel says, starting to clean up. “Thanks for… well, thanks.”

“No problem,” Tommy says softly.

They clean up quietly and by the time Joel checks in on Ellie, she’s fast asleep, remote still in her hand.

She didn’t even made it past the Netflix home page.

Eventually, after Ellie wakes up, they decorate the poor tree that has been sadly lacking in attention. Most of the ornaments are just simple white ones and the whole thing ends up being quite elegant. Joel likes his at home better, he thinks. Next year, if there’s a next year, he’s just going to take Ellie to Goodwill and set her loose. He has no doubt she’ll be able to find the most chaotic things.

“Ellie,” Tommy says, setting a box on the coffee table. “Do you wanna pick a stocking?”

She looks up from Joel’s phone. “What, for like instagram?”

“Do I look like I’m on instagram?” Tommy asks.

She shrugs. “No, but that’s usually why people give me a stocking.”

“That’s not how we do things,” Maria says. She got home in time to put a few ornaments on the tree, but she’s mostly been sitting off to the side and watching.

“Okay,” Ellie says, and wanders over to Tommy. “Joel, are you gonna pick one too?”

“Oh, I already have his,” Tommy says.

“You do?” Joel joins them, slipping an arm around Ellie’s shoulders. “I didn’t know you had those.”

To be honest, a lot of things after Sarah died are more of a blur for him. He knows Tommy helped him pack the house up when he decided to move to Boston, but he didn’t make most of the decisions about the stuff. A lot of it ended up in storage only because Tommy insisted and it was easier just to pay the bill every month than to deal with it.

“Our grandmother made those when we were babies,” he tells Ellie.

She looks at him with wide eyes. “Oh. So they’re really fucking old.”

She picks one out after a few more jokes, and hangs it next to his on the mantle. On the other side of hers hangs a stocking with Kevin written across the top.

Maria excuses herself for a little while, and none of them say anything when she comes back with red eyes.

They watch another old Christmas movie and eat way too many cookies. Ellie’s pretending not to be tired by the time he goes to grab a quick shower.

“You warm enough?” Joel asks, getting a blanket out of the closet. Maria told him where they keep the extras, and he automatically assumed it was for Ellie until she said he might want to grab another one for the couch. She may not be the biggest fan of him, but she’s a kind person.

Ellie starfishes in the bed, stretching. “’M okay.”

“Well, if you get cold, this’ll be here for you.” He lays it across the foot of the bed, folding it in half so she can grab it easy even if she’s half-asleep. “You got everything you need?”

“Yep.” She starts to prop herself up on one elbow, hisses, and folds her arm under her head instead. “How long are you gonna do this?”

“Do what?”

“Put me to bed like a baby.”

“Til you’re in college, probably,” Joel says, sitting on the side of the bed. “I don’t think your roommate will like me hangin’ around after that.”

She giggles. “You’re so fucking weird.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He reaches over and pokes her forehead. “Takes one to know one, weirdo. You want me to read you a Christmas bedtime story?”

She turns enough to stare at him. “Is that a real thing people do? I kinda thought it was just TV bullshit.”

Well, that won’t do.

He doesn’t exactly have a book, so he pokes around on his phone and eventually pulls up a Youtube video of someone reading the Night Before Christmas. It’s not quite the same, but Ellie hesitantly tucks her head against his shoulder, and they watch it together.

It’s a nice way to finish the evening, especially when she falls asleep against his shoulder.

He lets himself sit like that for a while, listening to her breath and feeling the weight of her.

They might have been joking about it earlier, but he meant it. He carried Sarah to bed the night before she died. She fell asleep on the couch while they were watching a movie, and he took her up to bed because he didn’t want to wake her. A part of him is grateful for that. He’s glad to have that memory, of her in his arms, asleep and safe and whole, one last time.

So if Ellie wants someone to sit with her while she falls asleep until she’s thirty, well, he’s willing.

He eases away when he’s sure she’s asleep and tucks the covers up around her shoulders.

He slips out of the house and grabs the bags out of the back of his truck, and nearly runs over Tommy in the living room.

Tommy, who is shoving candy into Ellie’s stocking by the handful.

“Seriously?” Joel says.

Tommy narrows his eyes. “If she’s gonna be ours, I’m gonna spoil her. You know that.”

“Sure,” Joel says, reaching into one of the bags he brought in from the truck. “But you’re not leavin’ any room for what I got her.”

Tommy stares for a minute, then breaks into chuckles he has to muffle with his arm. “Goddamn,” he says eventually. “You got wrapping to do, too?”

“God, yeah. Got some gift bags, but…”

“Nah,” Tommy says, shaking his head. “It’s more fun for a kid to unwrap presents. I’ll go get supplies.”

“Supplies” apparently also means spiked eggnog. Joel’s too fucking old for spiked eggnog, but he doesn’t say no.

They’ve both bought Ellie a pile of presents. Joel doesn’t comment on the presents on Tommy’s stack that are clearly for Maria. She’s already left hers neatly wrapped under the tree and gone to bed at a decent hour.

“Oh shit,” Tommy says and Joel looks up expecting blood. “Do we gotta put ‘From Santa’ on some of these?”

Joel snorts. “Think she’s old enough to know he’s not real.”

“But what about next year?” Tommy counters. “We wanna do Santa with the baby. What are we gonna tell them if they realize none of her presents have ‘From Santa’ on them? They’re gonna get a complex. She’s gonna get a complex.”

Joel’s not exactly sure how far along Maria is, but she’s not really showing yet. Maybe three, four months if he had to guess.

“Your kid probably needs to learn to read before that happens,” he says, and he can’t help smiling a little. He remembers this panic. “You got a couple years for that.”

“Right,” Tommy says and takes a breath. “Yeah.”

Joel drinks more eggnog. It’s still not good. “Next year you’ll probably be awake all night assembling toys.”

“I remember.” Tommy gives him a cautious smile. “That fuckin’ trike.”

They’d been awake until four in the morning trying to get that thing together, and Joel had threatened to shove every single one of the parts up Tommy’s ass by the time they got it together. He got about two hours of sleep that night, and it was entirely worth it to see Sarah’s smile in the morning.

“Good thing I’ll have my big brother to help me figure things out,” Tommy says.

“Good thing,” Joel repeats.

There’s a weight on his stomach.

“Joel,” Ellie whispers. “Joel, it’s Christmas.”

He groans, and opens one eye. Ellie is sitting on his stomach, her face alarmingly close to his.

“Go back to bed,” he mutters and closes his eyes.

Ellie bounces on his stomach. “Joel. It’s morning.”

“Doesn’t look like it.” But if she does that again, he’s absolutely going to throw up. He’s not the most hungover he’s ever been, but it’s definitely there. He opens his eyes again. “What time is it?”

“Like six.”

Of course it is.

She lets him sit up, scrambling to her feet. “Can I turn on the Christmas tree?”

“Sure you can.”

She doesn’t turn any other light on. The tree only has white lights on it, and it paints the room golden.

“You the first one up?” he asks.

Ellie nods.

He’d be surprised, but it only seems right to be waken up at the ass crack of dawn by a kid on Christmas.

“Let’s give Tommy and Maria a bit to wake up, then.” Soon Ellie won’t be the only one. Might as well let them sleep while they still can.

“Okay.”

She comes over and crowds into his space on the couch, tucking her feet under his blankets and up against his leg.

“Merry Christmas, Joel,” she says softly.

“Merry Christmas, kiddo.”

When it gets a little closer to seven － by which Joel means about twenty minutes after six, because Ellie’s “like six” was barely six at all － he heads into the kitchen to wrangle Maria and Tommy’s coffeemaker. It’s a lot more complicated than his, and he’s only mildly humiliated by Ellie coming out to hover at his elbow and figuring it out faster than him.

His only saving grace is Tommy looks as rough as he feels and visibly recoils when Joel offers him some of his damned candy cane creamer.

“Morning,” Maria says. She looks more well-rested, but she blanches at the coffee and turns the kettle on instead, grabbing a teabag from a jar on the counter. Joel manages a sympathetic grimace. Just seems unfair she’s as sick as either of them and didn’t even have any of the fun.

“How much coffee do you drink anyways?” Ellie asks.

Joel winces. “Don’t.”

As soon as they’re in the living room, Ellie lingers by the tree. “Is it time?”

Tommy stifles a yawn. “Stockings first, then presents.”

It’s what their parents always did. It wasn’t until he had Sarah that Joel realized half the purpose was to distract the kid for a while so they could shotgun coffee.

Ellie grins and darts over to the mantle.

“Could you give Tommy and Maria theirs?” Joel asks.

She delivers them quickly, then grabs hers and brings it over to him － and puts his next to him. It’s full, which he did not expect.

“What’s this?”

Ellie sits next to him, holding her stocking in her lap. “Maria took me shopping.” She looks down at her stocking. “Is this seriously all for me?”

Between Tommy and himself, it’s borderline overflowing. At this rate, she’ll need a bigger one next year.

He starts going through his stocking because she looks so excited, and starts laughing halfway through. “You little shit.”

That makes Tommy shoot him a look.

Ellie giggles. “What?”

“You know what.”

“Come on, it’s all the old man crap you like.”

There’s probably a whole box of individual oatmeal packets, a pair of drugstore reading glasses, a box of pudding mix, a tube of Bengay, a bottle of antacids, and at least three bags of Werther’s candy.

Joke’s on her. Those things are useful.

It cracks Tommy up, too.

All too pleased with herself, Ellie finally starts in on hers. Tommy seems to have gone largely the candy route, but Joel put little gifts into her stocking. Dinosaur socks, new hair elastics, gloves  because he’s noticed she never has any, a pack of space stickers, little things like that he thought she’d like.

“You got all this?” Ellie asks.

Joel pops the seal on the antacids and chews on two. “Maybe Santa did.”

“Think you’re up for passing out some presents?” Tommy asks Ellie.

She agrees quickly. Joel makes a mental note to make her take some ibuprofen as soon as she eats breakfast. He’d hate for her to end up hurting herself on Christmas. She’s so eager to be helpful. He noticed that right away, the way she always picks up after herself, and doesn’t ever complain about chores. He’s really had to watch that she doesn’t overdo it.

It’s funny, though, watching her realize just how many gifts under the tree are for her.

She migrates onto the floor to open them and Joel sneaks a picture of her. She’s still in her pajamas, a pair of red plaid pajama pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt that she definitely stole from him, her new dinosaur socks and a pair of reindeer antlers that he doesn’t even know where Tommy found. It’s a hell of a look.

He really did try not to get her too much. He wanted to buy her basically everything she’s ever wanted, but he didn’t want to overwhelm her. From what she’s said, she didn’t get a lot of gifts in her foster homes.

But she needed a better jacket, something actually warm for the winter. And he’s seen her doodling in her school notebooks sometimes, so he got her some sketchbooks and a pack of good quality drawing pencils, along with a few books he thought she might like. Things like that.

The problem is Tommy and Maria also apparently had similar ideas about how much stuff to buy her. There’s one of those colouring books for adults, a nice pack of coloured pencils, some fancy bath stuff.

Ellie has added a black knit hat with an alien on it and a necklace made of flashing Christmas lights to her outfit by the time she finishes unwrapping her gifts.

“Hey.” She nudges his leg and hands him a box he hadn’t seen until now. “This one’s a real present.”

“But you already gave me all that oatmeal.”

“Just open it, asshole.”

When he gets the box unwrapped, it startles a laugh out of him.

It’s a coffee mug, and a large one at that. Bright orange, with a cowboy boot, and the words, “Howdy, Y’all” printed on it.

He picks it up and turns it over in his hands. “Where on earth did you even find this?”

“Do you like it?” she asks anxiously. “There were a lot of sappy ones and I kinda thought about getting you one of those, but then I saw this one and...”

“I love it,” he says, and means it.

When they’re done presents, Tommy wanders into the kitchen to start breakfast and Ellie follows, offering to help. Joel thinks she actually just realizes Tommy will let her eat cookies before breakfast.

“Joel,” Maria says. She leans against the arm of the couch, and he realizes she’s holding the gift he gave her and Tommy.

He honestly had no clue what to get her especially, but Ellie actually helped him pick it out. It’s a nice frame, that he made sure would match all the other frames in the house － for ultrasound pictures. Then he had the store engrave “Baby Miller” into the bottom.

“Sorry, I just assumed the last name,” he says.

Maria puts her hand on his shoulder. “It’s beautiful. Thank you.”

Tommy makes French toast and bacon for breakfast. Joel lets Ellie put the horrid fucking candy cane creamer in the cup of coffee he drinks out of his new mug.

By ten o’clock, he realizes that she is dead asleep on the floor, curled up on her new jacket.

Maria’s gone to take a shower, and Tommy is working on stuff for dinner in the kitchen, so he could just get her up onto the couch and let her sleep.

She could really use some undisturbed sleep, though, and a house on Christmas with four people in it isn’t exactly quiet.

What the hell.

He slips his arms under her and lifts her up, surprised by how little she weighs. She settles against his chest with a sigh, her head resting against his shoulder, but she doesn’t wake up.

She doesn’t wake, either, when he sets her carefully down on the bed in the guest room. He slips the beanie off her head, leaving it and the necklace on the bedside table, and covers her with the spare blanket from the foot of the bed. Even on Christmas, she made the bed when she got up and he doesn’t want to disturb her by pulling the covers down.

“Merry Christmas, baby girl,” he whispers.

The day after Christmas, he, Ellie, and Tommy are lazing around in the living room doing a fat lot of nothing when the doorbell rings.

“Not it,” Tommy and Ellie say at the same time.

Joel rolls his eyes at them and gets up.

“Tommy Miller?” the woman on the doorstep says.

“Wrong Miller.”

“Oh, you must be Joel,” she says. “I’m Tess Servopoulus. Sorry to interrupt your holidays, but I brought Ellie’s things over.”

“She’ll be happy about that. Can I help you bring them in?”

“Well, I never miss the opportunity to avoid heavy lifting,” she says with a laugh.

It’s funny, until he goes to her car and all of Ellie’s stuff is in one suitcase and a single cardboard box.

He takes it into the kitchen, setting the box on the table and the suitcase next to it.

Ellie, who has absolutely not eavesdropping at all, comes over to inspect them. “That’s not mine.”

“It is now,” Tess says She smiles at Ellie, easy and friendly. “I work with a program that provides suitcases and backpacks to foster kids. Everything’s a little messy, I’m afraid. I didn’t want to just paw through all your things.”

“That’s okay.” Ellie opens the box and peers inside, then sighs as her shoulders slump. “Oh, good.”

“You’ve moved around a lot,” Joel says to her. “What do you normally put your things in? Just boxes?”

She pokes around in the box. “No, usually garbage bags.”

“I don’t believe in that,” Tess says simply. “Do you think it’d be okay if we talked for a bit, Ellie?”

He gives them some space. Ellie likes Tess, and the two of them have talked a couple times on the phone. As long as she’s comfortable, he’s not worried.

Tess doesn’t stay long. He introduces her to Tommy, but she leaves long before she overstays her welcome. They already have a meeting scheduled next week.

Ellie sits at the table and digs through the box, eventually pulling out a book.

Joel comes closer. “Is that another damn pun book?”

“Volume one,” she says, showing him the cover. She flips it open and stares at something for a long moment.

“You okay?” he asks, drifting closer.

“Hm.” She’s quiet for a moment, then takes out a strip of black and white photos, the kind that come from those photobooths in the mall. God, he hasn’t seen one of those in years.

“This is me and my best friend,” she says, holding it out so he can see. “We were in the same group home for a couple years.”

He smiles at the photos. They’re both making stupid faces, climbing all over each other. “Where’s she at now?”

Ellie’s breath catches. She puts the photo strip carefully back into the book. “She died.”

God.

“I’m so sorry, kiddo,” he says, knowing how inadequate it is.

“Her name was Riley,” Ellie says. “She was really fucking cool.”

He sits at the table next to her. “I’d love if you told me about her sometime. When you’re ready.”

Ellie nods. “I will.”

A couple days into the new year, Ellie wakes him so early in the morning it’s still dark.

He starts to move over automatically.

“Um,” she says. “Could you drive me to like Walgreens or something?”

This is, in fact, not his first time taking care of a teenaged girl. He recognizes that tone immediately. Maria probably has stuff, but there’s no way Ellie would ask her for it. She likes Maria well enough, but she still struggles with asking for things she needs.

He sits up and grabs his phone off the coffee table. “Sure, honey. Can you look up a place while I put some pants on?”

He pops into the bathroom to change his sweatpants for jeans, leaves a note in case someone wakes up, and they head out. Ellie programs the route into his GPS and they’re off.

When they’re parked outside a twenty-four hour CVS, he pulls his wallet out of his pocket. “Now do you want me to come in with you or do you want to go on your own?”

“Can you come with me?” Ellie asks. She makes a face. “Sometimes when I go in places alone they think I’m stealing and I kinda need to use their bathroom.”

“Sure.”

He lingers near the clearance Christmas stuff to give her some privacy, but she apparently doesn’t care that much, waving the box at him as she heads towards the till. He takes that as his cue to follow and pay.

After she takes care of all that, they head back to the truck.

“Can we get McDonald’s for breakfast?” She tosses the bag into the back and turns to him. “Uh-oh. You have that look like you’re about to tell me bad news.”

He sighs. “Sorry.”

She groans. “Alright, fucking hit me with it.”

He rests his hands on the steering wheel. “I have to go back to Boston in a few days.”

“And… I have to stay here.”

“Mostly.”

She nods. “For work?”

“No.” He turns and picks her hand up. It’s small in his, all delicate bones and baby soft skin. “I have to start those classes. I gotta make sure the house is ready, because they’re going to do a home inspection.”

He’s gotta fix the hole he left in the wall...

“I need to make sure they know I can take good care of you,” he says, giving her hand a squeeze. “But I’ll be out here all the time. So much that you’ll get sick of me.”

That makes her smile. “Okay,” she says, and he knows how much she’s trusting him. “Now how about that egg McMuffin situation?”

His house seems incredibly quiet without her in it. His two saving graces are that he’s barely got any down time, and that Ellie comes to visit as much as possible. Maria, apparently, works in Boston two days a week and usually drops her off for the day. On the weekends, he makes the drive up there and spends as long as he can. She’s not allowed to do overnights at his house, but she’s plenty old enough to get a say in where she spends her days.

Besides, at least Tommy and Maria know where she is, which is more than he could say for her old foster parents.

A few weeks into the new year, the investigation about Ellie is swiftly and quietly dropped. Maria won’t show him any of the crime scene pictures, and he doesn’t want to see them, but she tells him enough about the scene that he’s sick about it. Ellie’s blood was apparently all over the church, especially from where her head hit something. A pew, she told him later, despite the fact that she wasn’t supposed to be listening.

Nearly as damning is that almost immediately after the preacher’s death is publicly announced, other victims begin coming forward. Other girls who were hurt by him.

Ellie finds it a little overwhelming, Joel can tell. They decided to have her finish the school year online, figuring it’d be less disruptive than starting a new school, especially with everything that was going on.

Besides, it means that she can do school whether she’s in Boston or out at Tommy’s. Joel usually takes off work those days to stay with her, or if he can’t, she comes with him to work. His crew absolutely adores her, and he hasn’t really stopped being teased since they all realized she’s the reason he started taking time off, something he hadn’t done in… ever, basically. She has her own hard hat and safety glasses and she likes to follow him and his guys around asking questions when she needs a break from her school work.

They’ve been working hard to get her room set up. She picked out the paint colour for her room and they painted it together, making more of a mess than he would have made alone but having a far better time.

“You’re never getting a new bed,” Joel says, coming into the kitchen and grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge. “You break that one, I’m hangin’ a hammock from the ceiling and calling it a day. How’s that essay comin’ along?”

“Hm?” Ellie looks up at him, looking lost. “Oh. Fine.”

“You alright?”

She’s holding her phone, finally having gotten it back from the police. Joel immediately added her to his phone plan. He doesn’t ever want her to be without a way to call him. She turns the screen off and sets it down on the table.

“This uh. This girl called me a hero.” She picks at her cuticles. “She said she goes to the same youth group as I did. I don’t remember ever seeing her. He was… well, she posted that she was glad someone stopped him.”

He reaches out, giving her time to pull away if she needs to, but the moment he touches her shoulder, she leans into him, burying her face in his side.

“Someone else should have stopped him,” she says, words muffled by his shirt.

“You’re right,” he agrees, stroking her hair. “It ain’t fair you had to.”

He is incredibly grateful that Ellie being a minor means her name has been kept out of the news. Maria came and had a little talk with her former foster parents and may have threatened a lawsuit or even criminal charges if they said a word about her to anyone. Joel’s not really sure if there was any legal basis to the threats, but he wasn’t gonna argue about it.

It should be Ellie’s choice if or when she decides to tell people about what happened to her, and she shouldn’t be pushed a moment sooner than she’s ready.

She already has to go to therapy and she absolutely hates it, and takes every chance to tell him so. He told her that she’s going to keep going even when she lives with him, and it mollified her a little, for some reason. Social services also made her actually see a doctor. Joel let them take her anger on that while being secretly relieved.

Tommy or Maria usually drop her off for therapy, and then Joel tries to drive her back and have dinner with them. It’s over an hour of driving and he’d do it thrice over. She’s always a little unsettled on therapy days, and a lot of the time he ends up staying the night.

On one bad day, he was asleep on the couch when he woke up the sound of voices from the kitchen. He looked out to see Ellie and Tommy at the kitchen table, talking softly. He could hear Tommy talking about going to therapy himself after coming home from the army.

That’s the thing he’s most grateful for, he thinks. If he can’t be there all the time, he’s so grateful that Tommy and Maria are taking care of her in the meantime.

It takes just over three months. It feels like an eternity, and it also feels like too short of a time, like they should care more about Ellie’s well-being than for it to be that fast.

Tess calls him to tell him and lets him be the one to tell Ellie. He can hear how happy she is in her voice and he’s grateful all over again that Ellie has someone like Tess in her corner now.

He immediately drives out to Tommy’s, driving the speed limit only because the last thing he needs is to get pulled over.

He knocks, but doesn’t bother to wait for someone to answer, just lets himself in. Tommy’s in the kitchen making dinner, and Ellie’s sitting on the kitchen counter.

“Hey!” she says when she sees him, lighting up. “I didn’t know you were coming by today.”

Joel wanders, falsely casual, over to where she’s sitting. “Well, there was somethin’ I needed to give you.”

He takes a little box out of his pocket and hands it to her.

“Ooh, presents.” She opens it, then her face softens. “Is this mine?”

She lifts out the key and the UFO keychain he ordered special for her.

“Yeah, you’re gonna need it, aren’t you?”

It takes her a moment to get it, and then she launches herself off the counter so fast she almost takes them both down in the process.

He brought boxes, too. She’s not moving her things in damn garbage bags ever again.

They pack together, with her bossing him around and monitoring every single item he puts in a box. He has no issue with that. She hasn’t exactly had a lot of control over what happens to her or her things.

Even with everything they’ve gotten her, it only takes a few boxes. A lot of her stuff is at his house － their house － in Boston, since she spends a lot of her days there each week, but she still doesn’t own very much and it doesn’t take very long to pack it all up.

Tommy helps them load the truck up, and Maria comes out to see them off.

Ellie hesitates. “Hey, um. Thanks for letting me stay here.”

Maria steps forward and hugs her. “We loved having you around.”

When they separate, Tommy pats Ellie on the shoulder. “Don’t be a stranger, alright? Either of you,” he adds pointedly.

Joel takes that one with grace.

“Ready to go home?” he asks Ellie, just to see her smile.

He’s never seen a kid so excited to use her key. She makes him carry her things inside, but she won’t let him put anything away. He sits in the chair in her room and listens to her narrate just why she’s putting each specific thing in each specific place. She’s definitely been thinking about this for a while.

“This is really fucking cool,” she says, putting books on the shelves he made her. “I’ve never had my own room before.”

He gets up and catches her on yet another trip across the room, pulling her close enough to drop a kiss on her forehead. “How about I order some dinner?”

“Pizza?”

“Sure.”

He goes downstairs to order, and Ellie’s too distracted unpacking to realize he could just order online.

Truth be told, he needs a moment alone to breathe, or she’s going to see him cry and he doesn’t want her to think she did anything wrong.

He’s just so damn glad she’s here.

A lot of things are surprisingly easy. They already have a pretty good routine, and it only shifts slightly. He works from home two days a week, and she does school from the trailer on his jobsite on the others. On Sundays, they either have Tommy and Maria over or they go up to visit, depending on who feels more like doing the drive that week.

The house seems like it was meant to have her in it. It takes her a little while to get comfortable, but when she does, when she realizes he won’t get mad if the house looks like she lives in it, he can’t go two steps without seeing a sign of her. Her shoes and jacket by the entrance, her keys on the hook next to his, books she’s reading in the living room next to her favourite spot to read. None of it ever looks out of place. It’s like the house was always waiting for her.

Some things, though, take time to adjust. He doesn’t make the rules clear enough at first and Ellie isn’t sure where the limits are. She’s used to roaming more freely, and she disappears one afternoon for two hours and he almost has a heart attack until she finally texts back that she’s at the library and her phone died.

When she gets home, he fucks up and yells at her. The worst thing is, she doesn’t even get angry back. She just looks at him, shocked and betrayed, and stomps off to her room, slamming the door.

Ten minutes later, he’s apologizing through her locked door. She lets him in and they talk about ground rules.

The next day, he buys her a power bank.

The thing is, he realizes, is that Ellie isn’t used to having an adult who cares about her. She’s not trying to push the limits. She just doesn’t know that it’s normal to have them.

Other things are hard in different ways. She’s still having regular nightmares. Her therapist says that’s normal, when Ellie asks him to come into a session. Her therapist says it’s normal, too, when the nightmares get worse, and that it means she feels safe. Something about processing that he doesn’t really understand.

And some things are just tedious, for both of them. She’s managed to slip under the radar for a couple years on dentist visits. He spends an hour on the phone figuring out the best way to set up a bank account for her. She now always has emergency cash in her backpack, but she’s old enough to have a card for small purchases like something from a coffee shop or if she wants to get herself a new sketchbook or whatever. Besides, they give him money for taking care of her, which makes him feel like shit, so he wants to put in a savings account. She can use it for college.

But it never once stops being worth it. He loves Ellie’s bedhead in the morning, and the way she finds him the moment she comes home from something, and lazy movie nights on the couch with her making fun of his taste in movies. He’s started cooking again because he’s not gonna let her live on frozen dinners and take-out, and he actually enjoys it again when he’s chasing a mouthy teenager off the counters and trying to teach her how to make dinner without burning the house down.

To his surprise, she makes friends with Bill and Frank three doors down. Apparently Frank’s a painter and used to be an art teacher, and offers her lessons. Joel ends up spending awkward afternoons with Bill because Ellie’s nervous about going over there alone at first. Bill always bakes something. They don’t talk.

She’s not the most social with kids her age yet, but she has time for that and he understands. She’s been through a lot of upheaval in the last year. She can take her time.

The important thing is that despite the fact that she’s still healing, despite that she still has nightmares, despite her scars and his, they’re happy.

It’s a bad day to bring it up, Joel keeps thinking. It’s Ellie’s birthday, and they’re having a party later. Nothing big, just a few people. Tommy and Maria, of course, Henry and Sam － Ellie met Sam when he was visiting Henry at a job, and they’ve become thick as thieves, with Ellie even baby-sitting Sam a few times －and a couple of Ellie’s friends from the D&D group she started going to at the library. They invited Bill and Frank, too, and Bill reluctantly offered to bring a cake.

He likes Ellie, Joel knows, and is really just grumbling for show. He’ll probably end up kicking Joel off the grill when the cook out they’re planning starts.

She’s already wired. The only things she really wanted at her party was a big platter of cookies and a bunch of candy and she’s already been heavily sampling.

He think it’s probably as much excitement. It’s not even about the gifts. She’s just never had anyone celebrate her birthday like this.

He braided her hair this morning, something she demands as often as possible since learning he knew how. Her face is covered in glitter, courtesy of Tommy spending too much time in one of those teen fashion stores, and something he didn’t expect Ellie to love so much, but somehow makes perfect sense. She’s got a T-shirt on for the first time all spring. She’s been going to a specialist for the scar, and the treatments have reduced it enough that she can cover it with just a small bandage. It’s been a relief, and even the ones that hurt seem to lighten something in her.

Today she’s all light, and he… god, he’s glad she chose his porch that day.

“Ellie,” he says when she totally sneakily grabs another gummy worm.

“I’m not ruining my lunch!” she protests.

“Sure you aren’t,” he says. “Can we talk a minute?”

“Okay,” she says, a little uncertainly, and sits at the kitchen table.

He goes over and turns a chair to face her. He sits, rubbing his hands on his jeans. “I have somethin’ I need to ask you. Tess and I have been talkin’－”

“Ew,” she says. She’s convinced Tess is interested in him, despite how often he protests.

“Stop it.” He kicks her foot lightly, and she snorts. “We’ve been talkin’ about what － what it would take for me to adopt you. But first I need to know if that’s somethin’ you’d want. And it’s fine if you don’t, just－”

She launches herself at him, and he’s gotten enough used to that that he manages to catch himself on the table before she tips his chair back and lands them both on the floor.

“Are you fucking serious?” she asks against his shoulder.

He squeezes her as tight as he can. “Absolutely. So would that be－”

“Yes,” she interrupts. “Yes, I want you to adopt me.”

Joel cups the back of her head and kisses her temple, exhaling a little shakily. “Good,” he says. “’Cause I… I want that more than anythin’, kiddo.”

Ellie laughs softly. “This is officially the best birthday ever.”