Chapter 3: Mocam

She woke to her own ceiling.

The thin grey of an early morning that hadn't quite committed to being morning yet. Curtains pale at the window. The house doing its usual settling sounds, quiet and familiar. Somewhere below, the first shy smell of something warming in the kitchen.

Shyla lay still for a moment, both hands open on the blanket.

She was trying to hold the shape of something. A dream. Something that had needed to tell her something important. Something with very large eyes and a voice that said I have always known you as though those were not strange words at all, as though they were simply true.

But it was already going. The way dreams always go, like water out of cupped hands, quick and quiet, and then you're only holding the feeling of having held something.

She was still lying there, looking at the ceiling, when the door opened.

Grandpa came in the way he always came in, unhurried, quiet, the third floorboard giving him away half a second early the way it always did. He filled the room the way he always filled it, simply by being there, the way certain people do without trying, without knowing. Warmer. More settled. More like itself.

But this morning he stopped.

Just inside the door.

He was not looking at her. He was looking at the room, or more precisely at the air of the room, slowly, the way a man reads something that most people cannot see. His head tilted. His eyes moved, carefully, from one corner to another. Whatever the room was telling him, it was telling him something. Something that made the stillness in him go very quiet, not the quiet of a man at rest, but the quiet of a man who has found what he was looking for and does not yet know what to do about it.

Then she blinked at him.

And he saw her, and everything folded neatly away, and he smiled.

"Good morning, my Shy."

"Grandpa huggy," she said, and held out both arms.

He crossed the room to her, and she reached up, and her small palm turned open toward him in the thin morning light.

The three crescent scratches lay quiet across the soft skin. The thin dark line of dried blood neat as a secret.

Grandpa's hands closed around hers.

His face did not change. Not by a line, not by a degree. The warmth in it held completely and without effort, the way a wall holds, solid and steady and giving nothing away about what might be pressing against the other side.

But his jaw tightened.

Once.

Just once.

He breathed in slowly through his nose, eyes on her palm a moment longer than they needed to be. And somewhere in him, in the part that Shyla was still too small to read, something moved, slow and cold and very, very certain.

Then he looked up at her. Warm. Whole. Present.

"Good morning, my love," he said softly.

As though nothing at all were wrong.

As though the room had told him nothing.

As though the night had been only a night.

"Did Momma start making Mocam without me?"

Grandpa blinked. He had been somewhere else entirely, standing at the foot of her bed, looking at nothing in particular, his lips moving around words too quiet to catch, the way they sometimes did when he was carrying something heavy and trying to find a place to set it down.

Shyla was looking at him with the expression she reserved for situations that required immediate adult attention.

"Grandpa."

"Mm." He came back slowly, the way he always did when she pulled him out of his own thoughts, like watching a lamp warm up. "What was that, my Shy?"

"Mocam," she said again, with great patience. "Did Momma start without me?"

He smiled at her, and it was warm and real, and underneath it, very quietly, something else.

He murmured something under his breath, not to her, not quite to himself either, more the way a person speaks when they are talking to something they are not sure is listening.

"I don't know what is coming," he said softly. "But I believe in you." A pause, barely a breath. "Please protect her."

"Grandpa."

He looked up.

Shyla had, in the time it had taken him to finish his quiet prayer or promise or whatever it was, climbed approximately halfway up his side. She had both hands in his hair, thoroughly ruining it, and was patting his cheeks with the focused urgency of someone operating heavy machinery.

"Listen," she said, directly into his face. "To. Me."

"I'm listening."

"Take me to the kitchen." Pat. "I want to make the dough." Pat. "I always make the dough." Pat pat. "Take me, Grandpa, take me."

"Shyla."

"Na, Grandpa, na, take me, come on, let's go."

He laughed. It came out of him the way laughs do when they've been living in a serious place too long and finally find a gap, sudden and real and slightly helpless. He reached up, detached her hands from his hair with some effort, and sat her firmly back on the bed, where she bounced once with the energy of someone who has not yet accepted defeat.

"Your hand," he said.

She looked at her palm. Then back at him.

"It's fine," she said.

"It is not fine."

"It's a little fine."

Grandpa gave her the look, the one that was patient and warm and also absolutely immovable, the one that had never once in her entire life failed to mean this conversation is over.

"If water touches it," he said, "it will sting. So today," he held up one finger before she could gather herself for another attempt, "today, Momma makes the breakfast."

Shyla's face did something complicated.

"But I can tell her which dough," she said carefully. Negotiating now, rather than demanding.

Grandpa recognized the shift.

"You can tell her which dough," he agreed.

She considered this. Weighed it. Found it acceptable, barely, in the way a very small person accepts a very large concession, with dignity, and the clear implication that she was doing him a favour.

"Okay," she said.

Grandpa leaned down and pressed his lips to her palm, gently, right where the scratches were.

Then he breathed in.

And something happened in his face that Shyla did not see because she was already sliding off the bed, something small and sharp, there and gone, the way a door slams shut in a room you can't quite see into. His jaw set. His eyes went briefly, coldly still. He swallowed it down the way you swallow something that tastes like anger and must not be shown to a child.

By the time she looked back at him, he was only Grandpa again.

"Teeth," he said. "Clothes. I'll be at the door."

She padded to the bathroom, bare feet soft on the floor, already thinking about the kitchen and the dough and which kind she would tell Momma to make. Behind her, Grandpa stood alone in her room for a moment in the thin morning light, quite still, looking at nothing.

Then he went to the door and waited.

She came out a minute later, dressed, mostly, one collar folded the wrong way, hair doing more or less what it wanted. She took his hand without being asked. He straightened her collar without being asked.

And they went downstairs together, her small hand in his, the house quiet around them, the smell of Mocam drifting warm and patient up from the kitchen below.

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