Chapter 136 Aria’s proposal

Chapter 136 Aria’s proposal
Leon’s POV 

The house was quiet when I came in.

Not the occupied quiet of earlier, this was the emptier kind. The kind that meant the people who filled a house were somewhere other than in it.

I stood in the entrance hall. There was no Aria and other voices. The kitchen light was off and the sitting room door was open with nothing behind it.

Maria appeared from the back corridor with the quiet efficiency she always had.

“Mr. Ashford.” She looked at me with the neutral professionalism she maintained in all circumstances, which I had always respected and which tonight felt like its own kind of communication. “Mrs. Ashford took Aria out this afternoon. Shopping, I believe.”

I nodded.

“They shouldn’t be long,” she added. Then she went back to wherever she had come from and left me with the quiet house.

I put my jacket on the hook.

Stood there for a moment.

Alexa had taken Aria out.

The two of them somewhere in the city right now, Aria’s hand in hers, buying whatever Aria had convinced her was necessary. I knew my daughter. The negotiating ability was formidable and the ability to locate that negotiating ability in the presence of a parent who was operating from guilt was even more formidable.

I went to the foot of the stairs.

I was halfway up when I heard  the front door, the sound of it opening, and then Aria’s voice at full volume explaining something to someone, words tumbling over each other with the urgency of information that could not wait. I stopped and turned.

Aria came through the door first. Bags in both hands… well, one bag, she had clearly insisted on carrying something and had been given the lightest option. She was still talking. She saw me on the stairs and the talking redirected itself without pausing for breath.

“Daddy.” She dumped the bag immediately and came for the stairs with the focused energy of a small person who had identified her target. “You’re here. We went shopping and I got new pencils and Mummy let me get the sparkly ones even though they cost more and we had hot chocolate and the lady at the shop said my coat was pretty and I said thank you because Mummy said you always say thank you.”

She had reached me by the end of this and I crouched and caught her, and she threw her arms around my neck with the full commitment she brought to everything.

I held on.

Over her shoulder the front door was still open.

Alexa came through it.

Bags in both hands, more than Aria had been trusted with, her eyes down as she managed the door with her elbow. Then she looked up and found me on the stairs with Aria attached to my neck and our eyes met for a fraction of a second before I looked back at Aria.

“Sparkly pencils,” I said. “Important investment.”

“They have gold ones,” Aria said gravely. “Gold, Daddy.”

“Essential.”

She pulled back and looked at my face with the assessment she deployed when she was checking on someone. I kept my expression where I needed it.

“You weren’t at dinner yesterday,” she said.

The observation landed with the directness of someone who had been saving it.

“I had something,” I said.

“What something?”

“Work.”

She looked at me with transparent skepticism. “Maria said you weren’t here in the morning either.”

“I had an early…”

“I want a complete family at dinner,” she said. Not whining. Just stating a position with the calm authority of someone who had decided this was reasonable and couldn’t understand why it required explanation. “Not one parent at a time. Both parents. Together. At the table.”

I heard movement below. Alexa was setting the bags down, Maria appearing briefly and then disappearing again with the strategic exit of someone reading the room correctly.

“We’ll talk about dinner,” I said.

Aria’s eyes narrowed slightly. She recognized a deflection when she heard one. “That means no.”

“It means we’ll talk about it,” I said. “Come on. Let’s get you upstairs.”

I stood and took her hand and went up the rest of the stairs and she came with me, still talking about the pencils, the hot chocolate, something about a woman at the shop, while I listened, responded and kept moving.

We went to her room.

I sat her on the bed and she immediately pulled her shoes off and threw them toward the wardrobe with the casual inaccuracy she always brought to that task.

“Bath and bed,” I said. “You’ve had a long day.”

“I’m not tired,” she said. 

“Maria will come and…”

“No.” She looked at me with the particular expression she had developed specifically for moments when she had decided an outcome and was not going to be moved from it. “I want Mummy to do it.”

“Mummy can…”

“And you,” she said.

I looked at her.

“Both of you,” she said. “Together. Like before.”

Before.

The word was not weighted the way it would have been from an adult. She didn’t say it as indictment or plea. Just as reference. As the descriptor for a time when the default was both of us and she was asking for that default to be reinstated for the purpose of bath and bed.

“Aria…”

“Please Daddy.” She had the eyes. The ones that were her mother’s eyes in my daughter’s face and that had always been the most effectively disarming combination available in the known universe. “Just tonight. Just bath and bed. That’s all.”

I opened my mouth.

“I’ll cry,” she said.

“That’s not….”

“I’m not doing it on purpose,” she said with considerable dignity. “I just actually feel like I might.”

I looked at my daughter.

She looked back at me with those eyes and the complete honest vulnerability of a child who had spent weeks with one parent at a time and had decided she was done with that arrangement and was stating the done-ness clearly.

I was trying to formulate a response that was both honest and manageable when I heard it.

Footsteps in the corridor.

Then Alexa appeared in the doorway.

She had the bags from their outing, the ones that clearly contained things purchased for Aria, wrapped in the tissue paper that the shop used and that Aria had probably supervised the packing of with detailed instructions. She stopped in the doorway and looked between me and Aria with the expression of someone assessing a situation they had walked into midstream.

“Mummy,” Aria said, with the energy of someone whose reinforcements had arrived. “Tell Daddy. Bath time for today will be by both of you. Together.”

Alexa looked at Aria.

Then she looked at me.

The doorway between us was less than six feet of space and it had everything in it, the staircase, the corridor and the police station, the forest and the bedroom this morning and to me you’re dead said with everything I had was still sitting in the room between us without resolution.

All of it in a doorway while our daughter looked between us with hopeful eyes.

“You and Daddy will help me get ready for bed today,” Aria said. To both of us. A declaration more than a request. “That’s what I want.”

Alexa’s eyes were still on mine.

I looked away.

I didn’t know why I did that. Every other time since she had come back I had looked away first. I had made the looking away the statement, the deliberate withdrawal of attention as the only power move available to a man who was not going to shout in his own house.

I didn’t look away.

Neither did she.

The doorway held the moment and Aria looked between us and the house was quiet around all three of us and somewhere downstairs Maria was doing something in the kitchen with the practiced discretion of a woman who had worked in this house for eleven years and understood exactly when to be elsewhere.

Aria’s eyes went from her mother’s face to mine and back again with the hopeful attention of someone watching something she had been waiting for.