Chapter 117 Our Little Menace
Harper's POV,
It happened on a Thursday evening.
Nothing special about the day. Crew had come home from practice earlier than usual, smelling like ice and sweat, and gone straight to the shower while I attempted to make pasta without burning it, which was harder than it sounds when Rose kept pulling on my leg demanding to be picked up every thirty seconds.
"Up," she said. "Up up up."
"Baby I'm cooking. Two minutes."
"Up."
"Rose."
"UP."
I turned off the burner, picked her up, and held her on my hip while I stirred the sauce one handed. She grabbed a fistful of my hair immediately, which was her current favorite thing to do, and examined it with the intense scientific focus she applied to everything these days.
She was changing so fast it sometimes caught me off guard. Not the physical stuff — I'd expected that, had read every developmental milestone chart in existence with the clinical obsession of someone who spent their career understanding how bodies worked. It was the other stuff. The personality emerging in real time. The opinions she had about everything. The way she'd started watching Crew and me like she was studying us, filing information away.
She was a person now. A small loud opinionated person who hoarded wooden spoons and had strong feelings about which socks she wore.
Crew came out of the shower in sweats and a t-shirt, hair still damp, and immediately reached for Rose. She went to him without hesitation, the way she always did, like he was the most natural destination in the world.
"How was practice?" I asked, turning the burner back on.
"Good. Tyler was actually helpful today in the drill session with the younger guys." He settled Rose against his chest and she grabbed his damp hair instead, transferring her scientific attention seamlessly. "I think it's sticking."
"The conversation worked."
"Something worked." He opened the fridge and grabbed a water bottle, maneuvering around me in our small kitchen with the ease of people who've learned each other's rhythms. "How was your day?"
"Long. The board wants another formatting revision on the outcome reports. Different margins this time." I stirred the sauce harder than necessary. "I genuinely believe some of these requirements exist purely to test whether I'll quit."
"You won't quit."
"I know I won't quit. That doesn't mean I can't be annoyed about it."
He laughed and kissed the side of my head as he passed.
We moved around each other like that for a while. The ordinary choreography of a weeknight; Crew setting the table one handed while still holding Rose, me draining pasta, Rose gradually losing interest in Crew's hair and transferring her attention to the wooden spoon she'd somehow acquired again.
We then sat down to eat.
Rose had her own small bowl of pasta cut into pieces, which she approached with the same intensity she brought to everything. She picked up a piece, examined it, and put it in her mouth. Picked up another piece, examined it, handed it to Crew.
"Thank you," he said seriously, eating it.
She handed him another one.
"Also thank you."
Another one.
"Rose I think that's your dinner."
She looked at him. Then at her bowl. Then back at him. Processing.
Then she pointed at his plate. "More."
"You want more from my plate?"
"More."
"What happened to sharing being caring?"
She blinked at him with complete serenity.
I was trying not to laugh. "She's been doing that all week. Giving her food away and then demanding yours."
"Classic redistribution of wealth," Crew said, cutting a piece from his plate and putting it in her bowl. "Very political."
Rose examined the new piece. Deemed it acceptable. Ate it.
We fell into a comfortable dinner conversation; casually talking about practice, the board, a patient case I was thinking through, a younger player on Crew's team who was showing real promise. The easy back and forth of two people who'd learned how to exist in the same space without performing it.
Rose ate approximately forty percent of her dinner and distributed the rest between Crew's plate and the floor.
Afterward, Crew cleared the table while I started the bath routine, which involved chasing Rose down the hallway because she'd recently discovered that running away from bath time was hilarious.
"Rose Lawson if you make me chase you I will–"
She shrieked with laughter and ran faster on her unsteady legs, arms pumping, delighted with herself.
I caught her at the bedroom door, scooped her up, and she dissolved into giggles against my shoulder, completely unrepentant.
"You're a menace," I told her.
"Menace," she repeated.
I stopped walking.
Crew appeared in the hallway behind me. "Did she just–"
"Menace," Rose said again, very clearly, apparently pleased with the new word.
"Oh no," I said.
"That's your fault," Crew said immediately. "You said it first."
"I didn't think she was listening!"
"She's always listening." He came to stand next to us, looking at Rose with the expression he got sometimes — this quiet overwhelmed thing he tried to hide and mostly failed at. Like he still couldn't fully believe she existed. "She's been listening since day one."
Rose looked between us with great satisfaction, clearly understanding that she'd done something that got a reaction.
"Menace," she said again, for emphasis.
Crew laughed — the real kind, the kind that came from somewhere deep — and reached out to take her. She went to him and immediately grabbed his face with both hands the way she did when she wanted his full attention.
He went still.
She looked at him very seriously.
And then, in the careful deliberate way she had when she was trying out something new, she said: "Dada."
Not for the first time. She'd been saying it for a while now. But something about this moment — the way she was holding his face, the way she was looking at him like he was the most important thing in her world — made it land differently.
Crew's jaw worked.
He pulled her close and held her against his chest and closed his eyes, and I watched my husband hold our daughter in our hallway and felt something so complete it almost hurt.
I didn't say anything.
Some moments don't need words added to them.
After a long moment Crew opened his eyes and found mine over Rose's head. His were wet.
I crossed the hallway and leaned into them both, my hand on his back, Rose squished happily between us making a sound that was probably a complaint about being compressed but was also possibly just contentment… with Rose it was genuinely hard to tell.
"She called me dada," he said quietly. Like he needed to say it out loud to make it real.
"She did."
"In context and everything."
"Full contextual dada usage. Very advanced."
He laughed again, wet and quiet. "I'm not crying."
"I know."
"I'm really not."
"Crew."
"Yeah?"
"It's okay to cry."
He pressed his face into Rose's hair and didn't say anything for a moment. She patted his head with one hand, generous and unbothered, redistributing comfort the same way she redistributed pasta.
Eventually she lost patience with the stillness and started squirming, because she was fifteen months old and stillness was genuinely offensive to her.
"Bath," I said, taking her back. "Before she escapes again."
Crew wiped his face quickly, like I hadn't seen anything. "I'll clean up the kitchen."
"Crew."
He looked at me.
"Twenty-nine months," I said quietly. "You made it here."
Something moved across his face — recognition, gratitude, the weight of knowing exactly what that number meant and how close it had come to being a different story entirely.
"Yeah," he said. "I did."
He went back to the kitchen.
I took Rose to the bath, listening to her narrate the entire process in the half-language she was developing; real words mixed with sounds that meant something to her even if they didn't mean anything to us yet.
Menace, I thought, watching her splash.
Our little menace.