Chapter 23 Four In The Morning

Chapter 23 Four In The Morning
Dale
He hadn't slept.
That wasn't unusual lately. Sleep had never been reliable and since Monday night it had gotten considerably worse, which he supposed was what happened when you spent nineteen years not saying something and then said all of it in one kitchen conversation and your body didn't know what to do with the space where the weight had been.
He'd read Scarlett's note at midnight. Sat with it at the kitchen table for a long time.
Back soon. Lock the doors.
He'd locked the doors.
Then he'd sat in the living room in the dark with the television off for the first time in years and just sat there, which was harder than it sounded, and thought about Evangeline.
He heard the car at four in the morning.
Heard the doors. Voices he recognised, Scarlett's and the wolf boy's, and one he didn't, and then another one that stopped him mid-breath on the stairs.
He knew that voice.
He'd heard it every day for nineteen years in the specific way you heard things that weren't there anymore, the memory of a sound so worn into you that it played on its own whether you wanted it to or not.
His hand found the door handle.
He opened it.
She was standing on the path.
Older, yes. Worn in the way Scarlett hadn't found the words to prepare him for properly, the kind of wearing that came from years in a small space with nothing to do but endure. But she was standing upright with her hands at her sides and her chin level and her grey eyes finding him in the dark with the same directness they always had, and she was there, she was actually there on his path at four in the morning, and Dale Voss, who had not cried in nineteen years because crying required putting the bottle down and he'd never been able to manage both at once, felt his face do something completely outside his control.
"Evie," he said. His voice came out wrong. Too small. Nineteen years compressed into two syllables.
"Dale," she said.
Behind her he was dimly aware of Scarlett and the others stopping at a distance, giving them the path. He was grateful for that in a part of his brain that was still functioning. The rest of him was standing on the doorstep at four in the morning looking at his wife.
She crossed the path and stopped three feet from him.
He should have said something. He had nineteen years of things to say. They had all apparently decided to arrive at once and jam in the doorway because nothing was coming out.
What came out instead was the wrong thing.
"You planned this," he said. His voice had shifted from small to something with an edge to it, and he knew even as it happened that it was the wrong shape for what he was feeling but he couldn't stop it. "The letter. Getting her to Ashveil. You planned all of it and you didn't tell me."
Evangeline looked at him steadily. "I couldn't tell you. Any communication that reached you could have been intercepted."
"Nineteen years, Evie."
"I know."
"I looked." His voice cracked on it. "I never stopped looking and I couldn't find you and I thought—" He stopped. "I thought he'd killed you."
"I know," she said again, quieter.
"And this whole time you were alive and you were planning and you couldn't find one way to tell me you were alive, one word—"
"I sent the letter the moment I had a channel he hadn't mapped." Her voice had developed an edge now too, and something in him recognised it with an ache that was almost unbearable, Evangeline pushing back, Evangeline refusing to be talked at, every argument they'd ever had running on the same track. "I spent nineteen years in a room, Dale. I spent nineteen years away from my daughter. I spent nineteen years building the one plan that had any chance of getting her out of Aldric's reach and I did it alone because I had to and I will not stand on this path and be made to apologise for surviving."
The words landed.
He stood with them.
She was breathing hard now, the composure of the path cracked open, and her eyes were bright and she looked exhausted and furious and present in a way she hadn't been able to be for nineteen years and he looked at her and felt the argument drain out of him completely.
"I know," he said. His voice came out the way it should have started. "I know, Evie. I'm sorry."
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then something in her face gave way.
He stepped off the doorstep and she met him halfway and he put his arms around her and she put her face against his shoulder and they stood on the path at four in the morning while the fog moved through the pine trees and neither of them said anything else for a long time because there wasn't anything else that needed saying right now.
Over her shoulder he could see Scarlett standing at the edge of the path.
His daughter. Their daughter. Dark haired and silver eyed and watching her parents with an expression that was trying very hard to stay composed and not quite managing, and he thought about every year he'd looked at her and seen Evie's eyes and flinched from it and felt the specific grief of all the times he could have done better and hadn't.
He held his wife and looked at his daughter and made himself a quiet promise.
He held it for a long time.
Then Evie pulled back and turned and looked at Scarlett properly and opened one arm.
Scarlett came.
The three of them on the path at four in the morning, the fog and the pines and the lights of Ashveil soft around them, and Dale Voss held his family together for the first time in nineteen years and felt the weight he'd been carrying so long he'd forgotten what it felt like to put it down finally, completely, leave his hands.