“Yes?”
“Can Fiona sing?”
Fiona laughed. “Absolutely not.”
Dominic looked at her. “I’ve heard worse.”
“From who?”
“My enemies.”
“That is not comforting.”
Arthur giggled.
So Fiona sang “You Are My Sunshine” badly, softly, and too slowly, because that was how Arthur remembered his mother singing it.
By the second verse, his eyes were closing.
By the third, he was asleep.
Fiona stepped into the hall, and Dominic quietly shut the door halfway, leaving a strip of warm light between Arthur’s room and the dark.
He did not close it all the way.
Not anymore.
Some children needed proof that the door would open if they called.
Some fathers needed it too.
Dominic took Fiona’s hand.
No cameras. No guards. No marble foyer. No blood.
Just a quiet hallway in an American house, with a sleeping child behind one door and a future waiting behind every other.
Fiona looked at their joined hands, then at him.
“You know this doesn’t make us normal.”
Dominic smiled faintly.
“No.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Normal is overrated.”
He leaned down and kissed her forehead, not with hunger, not with desperation, but with gratitude.
Arthur slept.
The house held.
And for the first time in a long time, no one screamed in the dark.
THE END
