She was afraid of him.
By the time she reached the bed's edge, the brightness she had come in carrying was entirely gone. In its place was a small, contained sadness, the kind that belongs to children who arrive somewhere full and leave the fullness behind at the door. The words she had rehearsed on the way here, whatever they had been, seemed to have left her. Her hands found the edge of the blanket and held it, fingers curling into the fabric for something solid to hold onto.
Because now, she didn't know how to behave, what to say, or what she had or hadn't needed to do.
"We heard what happened," Sera said into the quiet still bedroom, stepping forward. Her eyes moved across Dakota's face, reading the pallor and the lines of residual pain, then shifted to the stiff set of Takoda's small shoulders. She offered the words carefully, as a way of filling the room with something neutral while the space between Kade and his daughter recalibrated itself, or failed to.
