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Joel wakes to the faraway sound of several people screaming, and his ears automatically strain to siphon Ellie’s voice out of the cacophony. Ever since Colorado, that instinct has been making its way back into his repertoire, leftover from those years of Sarah’s childhood when silence meant trouble.
“Mother fucker,” someone cries, and Joel would know his kid’s voice anywhere, even with what must be at least a floor between them.
He’s on his feet and careening down the hallway in an instant, memories crashing into him as he tries to piece together why the fuck he’s in an empty hospital. There’s a clatter above him, and then a gunshot rings out through the hospital, and he’s tripping over himself on the way to the stairs.
Blinking away memories of Sarah in his arms, he throws himself through the doors to the stairway and takes them two at a time, following the sound of chaos onto the surgical floor. He chokes on the realization that Ellie’s in an operating room.
“Do not fucking touch me!” she shouts, and there’s a sickening crack as someone hits the ground. He finds them in OR 6, for whatever reason, and there she is.
His little girl, wearing a hospital gown with her hair pulled out of its usual ponytail, backed into a corner with a gun in her hands. A handful of Fireflies, fucking Marlene included, are pointing their own guns at her. A stocky soldier lays dead across the room, having lost his battle to a well-aimed bullet between the eyebrows, and someone else is sprawled on the ground next to Ellie, presumably knocked out with the end of her pistol.
“Ellie,” he calls, and everyone in the room turns to look at him. It’s just enough of a distraction for him to cut between his kid and the group of people with the means and, presumably, the motive to kill her.
“Joel,” she whispers in disbelief. He feels her moving behind him, and he’s half-expecting a hug or something when she surprises him. She steps around him and points her gun at Marlene with a terrifying air of finality about her. “You fucking cunt .”
“Okay, we’re doing this now.” Joel reaches for her, laying a careful hand on her elbow. “Now hang on, baby girl-”
“-No! She fucking-” She turns back to Marlene who, for her part, has completely abandoned her own gun and has her hands in the air in surrender. “You said Joel left me here! I should fucking k- ill you.”
Her voice cracks, and a small, delirious part of Joel’s brain whispers, Yeah, maybe this is warranted. But the larger part of him - the part that knows that if she kills Marlene, neither one of them will make it out of this alive - says, “Breathe, baby. Drop the gun, okay?”
Her hands are trembling where they’re wrapped around the trigger, and he’s somewhat afraid she’s going to kill Marlene by sheer accident, which seems almost more traumatic than if she did it on purpose. But then she juts her chin toward the rest of the Fireflies and says, “I will if they do.”
A lot of things seem to happen all at once - Marlene nods minutely, the Fireflies all carefully set their guns on the ground, and Ellie collapses back into Joel as the gun slips out of her hands. “Okay,” he whispers, sinking to the ground with her in his arms. “Okay, it’s okay, I’m right here.”
“I don’t want…” she says, trailing off like she can’t even make herself say whatever it is she’s trying to. Joel just pulls her closer, letting her hide her face in his shoulder.
He grabs the gun she dropped and glares up at Marlene. “You wanna tell me what the fuck happened here?”
“We… We were getting her prepped for surgery, and-”
“Surgery?”
“-we must not have given her enough anesthetic, because she woke up on the operating table.”
“You-” He pauses and takes a deep breath so as not to startle Ellie. “You couldn’t even give her enough anesthesia, and you were planning on doing fucking surgery? Without even telling her? You would’ve killed her!”
A heavy silence falls over the room, the Fireflies at least having the decency to look ashamed of themselves, and then Ellie bites out, “Yeah, but they fucking knew that.”
“Wait, what?”
“We need a sample of the cordyceps on her brain,” Marlene says. Need. Present tense.
“You’re fucking insane if you think you’re laying a finger on my kid.” He instinctively holds her tighter, like something in him has deluded itself into thinking he can keep her safe with just his arms. Like something in him has deluded itself into thinking that if he never stopped holding her - in Colorado, in the water, in this goddamn hospital - he would’ve been able to keep her safe.
“Well, that should be Ellie’s choice, don’t you think?” she asks, voice sugary like she doesn’t know exactly what she’s doing. Before Joel can tell her to shut the fuck up, she looks Ellie in the eye and says, “I mean, you’ve come all this way, right?”
“I- I don’t-” she stammers, looking up at him with those goddamn watery brown eyes. “What-”
“And it’s what your mom would want, you know.”
Joel has half a mind to smack her in the face, but he doesn’t want to let go of Ellie. She beats him to it, though, scrambling to her feet and moving to shove Marlene in the chest. Every single Firefly in the room inches toward their gun, but Marlene shakes her head almost imperceptibly. “Don’t you fucking bring my mom into this,” Ellie spits.
“I promised Anna I’d-”
“You ‘promised Anna’ you’d keep me safe, asshole. Not knock me out and cut my fucking brain out of my fucking head!”
“Hey, you told me you wanted to do this,” Marlene says, taking a step forward, which Ellie immediately counters by backing into Joel.
Again, she says it before he can. “No shit I did! I had just shot my best fucking friend - slash maybe kind of my girlfriend, which makes it so much worse, but I do not have time to get into that - and there you were, all ‘hey, Ellie, wanna save the fucking world with me?’ What was I supposed to say, ‘no thanks, last remaining connection to my dead mom, I’m actually just gonna pass on ending the goddamn apocalypse’? And besides, no one was asking me to die for this - actually, that’s still the case, because you didn’t. Fucking. Ask! None of you did!”
“Well, neither did-”
“If you say ‘neither did Joel’ right now, I swear to God I am going to punch you so hard you can hear fucking colors. No, he didn’t ask me if I wanted to die, and yeah, he probably wouldn’t let me go through with this even if I wanted to, but Joel’s still the only person in this room who gives a fuck what I want. He literally walked across the entire country because I wanted to do this! He got fucking stabbed with some rusty-ass metal whatever-the-fuck and basically came back from the dead and then pulled me out of a burning building and then we walked another, like, 600 miles because I wanted to. Because that’s what dads do! Actually not really, because most dads would have called it quits before we even left Massachusetts. But my point still stands, bitch!”
Joel’s still processing the ‘maybe my girlfriend’ part of her speech by the time she gets around to calling him her dad, which almost legitimately kills him, if the twinge in his chest is to be believed. And then she’s doubling over, hands on her knees as she tries to catch her breath, which seems fair because she hasn’t spoken this much since three nights after killing David, when she broke down and started destroying everything she could get her hands on in the house they were camping in. Even then, she wasn’t speaking in full, coherent sentences, mostly just strings of curses and unintelligible words.
“Oh, that was a lot,” she mumbles to herself. “I think I’m gonna throw up.”
“Would you all please just get the fuck out?” he snaps, looking up at the Fireflies standing around them in an uncomfortable group.
“Uh, yeah, I’m just gonna…” one of them says, one foot already out the door as he backs out. It hits him, then, that the majority of the people in the room never really wanted to kill Ellie, they were just convinced it was the only option. Once one is gone, most of the others leave, too, and then it’s just Ellie, Joel, Marlene, and a couple of people who… might have been medical professionals in the Old World.
“Oh my God, am I actually sick?” Ellie asks, clearly trying very hard not to gag. “Because I was just, like, exaggerating, but now I think I’m actually gonna throw up.”
“Nah,” Joel promises, rubbing soothing circles on her back like he always did for Sarah when she came home from school with some mutant, invincible version of the flu. “You’re just… you’re exhausted, and probably real dehydrated. You just take some real deep breaths for me, okay?”
“M’kay,” she says, nodding minutely as he helps her stand up.
“You okay?” he asks.
She nods, but as soon as she looks up at him, tears well up in her eyes. “I don’t wanna die.”
It breaks him a little, but Joel tries to keep his composure. “Well, then it’s a damn good thing I’m here, huh? ‘S just like you said. I wouldn’t let you even if you did want to,” he says, brushing her hair out of her face and pressing a kiss to her forehead. With a pointed look at Marlene, he tucks his gun into his waistband and says, “Let’s go home, huh?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Home.”
—
“So, I don’t like boys.”
Joel blinks as he merges onto the interstate. He’d kind of been expecting her to not want to have this conversation. “...Right,” he says slowly, still not 100% sure if he should look at her. When he risks a glance, she’s got her eyes trained on her shoes. “Hey.”
Ellie just hums, barely even looking up at him.
“I know we’ve been a little, uh, busy lately, but I didn’t forget about our fight in Jackson.” She inhales sharply. “No, it’s- I’m not mad at you or anythin’. I’m just… I’m sorry, Ellie. I was just so fucking scared of letting you down - not bein’ able to protect you - that I just… I thought the only way to keep you safe was to let you down before it mattered- before you were in danger. I know what I said, but… far as I’m concerned, you are my daughter.”
“Oh,” she whispers, voice breaking.
He takes one hand off the wheel and offers it to her. After a few terrifying seconds, she takes it and squeezes it tightly. “Baby girl, I just need you safe and healthy and happy. I’m sorry I don’t know what else to say, but I love you, and that ain’t just goin’ away.”
“Thanks,” she sniffles. “Sorry, that’s so lame, I just don’t know what else to say.”
“That’s alright,” Joel promises, squeezing her hand. “I don’ know either.”
—
It’s pitch black when they get back to Jackson, but the whole trip only took about six hours, thanks to the car he sort of stole from the Fireflies. Ellie’s sound asleep in the passenger seat, having given up on her quest to watch the stars for their entire car ride. Meanwhile, Joel’s been doing his best not to get into a wreck - dodging all the wreckage left on the interstate is bad enough without the phrase ‘that’s what dads do’ running through his mind on a loop.
He’s been trying, and failing, to figure out when exactly she went from ‘some kid’ to ‘his kid’ - when she stopped being cargo and became his reason to keep going.
After a very long exchange with Maria - one that would’ve taken significantly less time if he hadn’t been speaking at approximately one decibel to avoid waking Ellie - he gets permission to drive the car into Jackson. As he pulls into the driveway of the house Tommy’s apparently been fixing up for them, he has a sneaking suspicion that this is the last time he’ll ever see this car, let alone drive it.
“So?” Maria asks as soon as the car door shuts behind him.
“Oh, uh, thanks for the house? I gotta get Ellie inside,” he says, and Maria looks at him like he’s stupid. He realizes after an embarrassingly long moment that he completely fucking is. “Oh! The trip. Yeah, uh, it… didn’t work out.”
“...What didn’t work out?” Maria asks, clearly suspicious, and Joel suddenly remembers that she doesn’t know about Ellie’s immunity. He throws a probably very noticeable glance through the open car window and finds her awake, trying her best to be inconspicuous as she covers her bite mark with one hand.
“Well,” she says, and a smile pulls at his mouth as it registers with him that she’s about to save both of their asses. Or potentially get herself killed. “We were going to find the Fireflies, right? ‘Cause I was looking for them when Joel found me, and he was just too much of a fucking dad to let me wander around in the snow on my own. So Tommy was like ‘they’re in Colorado’ and they totally fucking weren’t - but that’s not his fault because they used to be there but they left.”
“Uh huh,” Maria says slowly.
“Yeah, but they left these voice recordings like ‘hey if you’re looking for the Fireflies we went to Salt Lake City’, which is, like, super irresponsible, because what if we were trying to kill them. But we weren’t trying to kill them so we were like ‘okay let’s go to Salt Lake City’ and then Joel got super sick - he’s fine now, obviously.”
“Yep,” Joel says, plastering a smile on his face. It would seem she’s going for the ‘lies work better if they’re close to the truth’ approach. “Totally fine.”
“And so we’re in the middle of fucking Colorado and Joel’s basically dead, but not really dead, and then, uh…” She pauses, breath hitching as she tries to decide how to explain what happened without making herself cry. “Long story short, I smashed a guy’s head in with a machete and we decided maybe we should just come back.”
“That was the short version of the story?” Maria asks.
Ellie grins and gets out of the car. “Yeah, dude. I just condensed months of drama into thirty seconds of witty anecdotes.” She turns to Joel and says, “I’ll bring in our bags if you bring the clothes and drugs.”
“What drugs?” Maria asks.
“She’s kidding,” Joel says automatically. If Maria were to open the trunk right now, she’d find the absurd amount of medication and clothing they took on their way out of the hospital in Utah. Some of the Fireflies looked like they wanted to stop them, but Ellie just flashed her ‘you just tried to kill a 14-year-old’ eyes and they all seemed perfectly happy to stand down.
“Weird thing to joke about.”
“...Yeah. Have you met her?”
Before Maria can respond, Ellie gestures toward the door and says, “Uh, Joel, can you…?”
She’s asking him to check if it’s safe, he realizes, and suddenly he couldn’t give less of a fuck what Maria does. He reaches into the car to grab the pistol he left in the glove box, and doesn’t even need to turn around to see the disapproving look he’s being given. “You’re really not supposed to-”
“I know,” he says, quiet enough to keep Ellie from hearing. “But we’ve had a crazy few months - hell, we’ve had a crazy year. Please just let me help my kid feel safe.”
Her eyebrow quirks up at ‘my kid’, but she just sighs and says, “You’ll come over for breakfast tomorrow? Tommy’d like that.” He’s well aware that it’s not really a question, but she’s giving him the chance to choose something, to go to breakfast because he wants to, not because someone’s making him. In that moment, likes Maria a little more.
“Yeah,” he says. “We’ll be over. But, uh, I don’ think either one of us is plannin’ on waking up real early.”
There’s a thud behind him, and Joel turns around to where Ellie’s still waiting on the porch with their backpacks in a lump by her feet, hand twitching toward the doorknob like she’s trying to force herself to just walk in. “I don’t know why I can’t just-”
“I got’cha,” he says, rounding the car and starting toward the porch stairs.
“No,” she sobs, grabbing her backpack like she’s mad at herself for dropping it. Joel picks up his own and carefully takes hers out of her hands. “I don’t get it. Why can’t I just fucking walk in the door? Everything went wrong in- in Boston, like a lot of times in Boston, and a little bit in Lincoln, and in Kansas City, and Colorado, and S- and everything just keeps going wrong, and I’m fine because I can handle all of that. But God fucking forbid I try to walk into my own fucking house without a fucking gun in my hand, because that’s just too much for poor little fucking Ellie!”
“Oh-kay,” he says slowly. By his count, this is her third monologue in the past eight hours, which seems like a fucking lot - especially for a deeply traumatized 14-year-old girl. “You’re okay, baby girl.”
“Why do I just keep fucking losing it today?”
“I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say it’s got something to do with how much you’ve been through these past few months. And you must’ve reached your boiling point after what happened in Salt Lake City, so now I reckon you’re just gonna have to get it all out.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Sorry, kiddo, but it doesn’t work like that.”
“What happened in Salt Lake-”
“-Maria, as my sister-in-law, and as the boss of this whole place, I got a lot of respect for you. But as the woman who is not makin’ my daughter feel better right now, I’m gonna have to ask you to shut the fuck up… And I would just like to reiterate that I do respect you.”
Ellie outright cackles at that, and then starts giggling hysterically, which he’s just going to have to accept as a win. He didn’t mean to call her his daughter, especially not in front of someone else, so he counts himself lucky that she’s not currently sobbing. Laughing - hysterical or otherwise - seems pretty damn preferable to crying right now.
“Oh my God,” she cries. “She probably thinks we’re insane.”
“I don’t think you’re insane,” Maria insists. “I’m just, uh, a little confused.”
“So here’s the thing,” Ellie starts, and Joel all but trips over himself to get the front door open.
“C’mon, honey, let’s get you in-”
“-Back in Boston-”
“-Oh, Lord-”
“-I went to this mall with Riley, who was my best friend - I say ‘was’ because she’s dead now-”
“-You really don’t have to-” Joel refuses to grab her unless they’re in danger, so his hands are mostly just hovering awkwardly above her shoulders.
“-And then I kissed her and then she got bitten and-”
“- And we’re going inside now,” Joel says loudly, deciding that Ellie risking getting shot if Maria sees her bite counts as danger. He rests a gentle hand on the middle of her back and guides her inside.
“Wait, what about the drugs?” she asks once they get inside, the hysteria seemingly having faded at the prospect of Joel forgetting their things.
“I’m goin’ back for ‘em,” he promises, dropping their bags by the stairs. “You just… why don’t you go pick which room you want?”
“There’s not gonna be anything bad up there?”
“Nah,” he says softly. “Just you.”
Ellie rolls her eyes and grabs her bag before setting off up the stairs. “I know I’m losing my mind today, but that’s still not funny!”
He stands there listening as her footsteps fade for a while before going back outside.
—
Unsurprisingly, he finds Maria right where he left her. What does surprise him is that Tommy’s standing next to her, presumably having come to find her when he woke up and realized she was gone. “So,” she says, looking up at Joel. “What happened in Salt Lake City?”
“Pulled a bank job,” he deadpans, pulling his brother into a hug. “Alright?”
Tommy nods, then turns to Maria. “You should get some sleep - you’ve got work real early tomorrow. I got this.”
Maria hesitates, but ultimately agrees. “See you at home,” she whispers, kissing Tommy goodbye, and then she’s disappearing down the street.
“Thought y’all were gon’ be back a lot sooner,” Tommy says as soon as she’s out of earshot. Not for the first time, Joel sends up a prayer of thanks for his brother. “Was startin’ to think you weren’t coming back at all.”
“Yeah, it’s… it’s a real long story, and it’s not all mine to tell. But I got all the way here from Boston, and you think a trip to Colorado is gonna knock me on my ass?” he teases, and the uneven stitches in his abdomen sting like they’re trying to remind him of their presence. One of his hands unconsciously reaches for the wound, and he has to flex his fingers to remind himself not to touch it.
If Tommy notices his fuck up, he doesn’t mention it. Instead, he just gestures at the house and asks, “This gonna work? I wanted to put y’all back up in the house we had you in before, but the roof collapsed in the snow.”
Joel snorts, rearranging his arms so he can get everything inside in one trip. “It’s damn good, Tommy. Thank you.”
“Ellie like it?”
“Uh… I’m sure she’ll love it once she’s feeling a little better.”
“Shit, is she sick? I can get the doctor-”
“She’s not sick,” he promises. “I mean, unless you count real bad PTSD. You know how it is Outside - now that she doesn’t have to worry about staying alive, it’s all catching up with her.”
He nods knowingly. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”
They stand in silence for a while, and Joel’s mind decides to fill the quiet with flashes of Ellie screaming in the hospital. “I’m, uh, gonna go…”
“Right, yeah. I’ll get out of your hair. Come get me if you need me - you remember where our house is?”
Joel nods. “Across from the one without a roof, right?”
“Yeah,” he laughs. “By the way, could you…?”
“You get me a toolbox, and you got yourself a deal.”
“I’ll work on that,” Tommy promises, grinning as he walks backward down the driveway.
Joel can’t help but wait until he disappears from view to go back inside.
—
“You pick a room yet?” he calls, wandering upstairs with both of their bags in hand.
When Ellie doesn’t respond, he swallows his panic and follows the light spilling out into the hallway from a cracked door. It swings open under his fist when he knocks, and he finds Ellie sitting cross-legged in the middle of a queen bed, turning the empty bottle of penicillin she got from David over in her hands.
When he steps into the room she’s claimed as her own, she looks up at him, hands faltering. Her hair’s all tangled, the hair tie she used to pull it back with abandoned in a surgery suite in Utah. “Hang on,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”
After a bit of aimless wandering, he finds the second-floor bathroom and pulls open all the drawers under the sink. When Maria said Tommy had been fixing up the place for them, she wasn’t kidding. There’s pads and tampons and multiple kinds of deodorant and soap, and, in the third drawer, he finds what he’s looking for: a hairbrush and a handful of hair ties.
He grabs them and brings them back to Ellie’s room. When he offers them to her, something flashes in her eyes. She opens her mouth, then closes it again. Just before she can reach out to take them from him, he asks, “You mind if I do it? I mean, it’s been a while, but I used to be pretty damn good at french braiding.”
“What’s a french braid?” she asks, already turning to sit facing away from him.
It doesn’t come as a surprise to Joel that Ellie didn’t exactly grow up like Sarah did, but the realization that she doesn’t even know what a french braid is - that the simple girlhood of sleepovers and midnight snacks and braid trains got taken from her - fucking hurts. “It’s like a regular braid, but, uh, fancier.”
“Did French people invent it or something?”
“Nah, I doubt it.” He starts carefully brushing her hair, incredibly grateful she doesn’t have curls like Sarah. Even with a paycheck’s worth of hair products at his disposal, ‘do Sarah’s hair’ accounted for the majority of his morning schedule until she was old enough to do it herself.
“So it’s all just a lie? A hoax? A ruse?”
“Oh, I have bad news about french fries.” He sets to parting her hair in the middle, then splits the first half into three sections.
“Ha ha,” she deadpans, allowing Joel to guide her head to the side so he can start braiding.
They lapse into a comfortable quiet as he re-trains gentleness into his calloused hands. After a while, Ellie holds up the penicillin bottle and asks, “Do you think I did the right thing?”
“In Colorado?” he clarifies, tying off the first braid. “Ellie, you saved both our lives and kept us alive for weeks .”
“No, that’s not what I mean- it’s hard to explain.”
“I got time,” he says easily, parting the other half of her hair.
“It’s… this goddamn medicine cost so much. Like, at first it was just a deer, and that was a damn good trade, right?”
“Yeah,” he hums, knowing damn well he’s mostly just here to listen and braid.
“But then… I almost died, and Callus did die, and you almost died, and David almost- a whole bunch of shit almost happened. And now apparently I have PTSD or whatever you call it, because I have nightmares all the fucking time and sometimes it’s like I can’t breathe, or like I can’t stop fucking talking - you know, like right now?”
“Oh, sure,” Joel says, fighting to keep his voice light. The more she says, the harder it gets to keep himself from interrupting her.
“And the thing is… I would do it all over again. Because this shit saved you, and that makes it all worth it. And so maybe- maybe it would’ve been worth it if I had-”
“No,” he interrupts firmly, dropping her hair and pushing her shoulder to get her to turn around.
“I’m not worth more than the whole world, Joel.”
“You don’t owe the world anything, okay? Not your immunity, not your life, ‘specially not your happiness. You’re fourteen. You’re supposed to be having fun, not saving the damn world. ‘Sides, there ain’t nothin’ worth saving anymore. Not if it takes killin’ a kid - without asking, without giving you time to say goodbye, without even tryin’ anything else.”
“Oh, shit,” she exclaims. “Do you think we should’ve let them, like, draw some blood, or something? You know, so they could at least run some tests?”
“Uh…” Joel reaches out to nudge her elbow. She looks down when he turns it over and her eyes catch on the bruise and tiny spot of dried blood there. “I don’t think that’s our problem.”
“Oh, those mother fuckers, ” she hisses, turning around and shaking her head around in a terribly un-subtle hint that she wants Joel to finish the second braid. “When did they even do this?”
“Before you woke up, I reckon.” He undoes the now-unsalvageable part of the braid he’d gotten done before he let go of it.
“Yeah, but like… weren’t they a little busy, like, keeping me from dying? What, was Tweedledee doing CPR while Tweedledum fucking harvested my blood?”
Joel pauses, coming to the too-late realization that Ellie doesn’t remember what happened after she passed out. In retrospect, he really hasn’t been at his best today. “That’s- Actually, nevermind.”
Ellie looks over her shoulder at him - dragging his hands along with her hair - and her eyes light up with a familiar mischief he hasn’t seen since the walk to Bill and Frank’s place. “Oh, you have to tell me, now.”
“Nope,” he says, playfully pulling on her hair until her head is positioned right. “Axe murderer.”
“Okay, you can’t expect me to believe the lie I made up,” she responds. “...Is it actually bad?”
“I don’t really know,” he admits. “It’s nothing huge, but- don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve been in kind of a… rough mental state today. An’ don’t get me wrong, I understand why - I’ve been all shook up, too. But I just don’t wanna say anythin’ that’ll make it worse.”
“Tell me,” she says decisively. “If I don’t know, my brain’ll just make up all kinds of crazy shit and be all, ‘hey Ellie, here’s a horrifying nightmare’, and it’ll be at least 50% worse than the truth.”
“You sure?”
“I literally just gave you a whole explanation about how sure I am.”
“... Fair enough.” He finishes her hair, but she makes no move to turn back to face him. She’s doing them both the favor of avoiding eye contact. Smart girl. “After you went under, I was able to get you out and I was doin’ CPR when the Fireflies found us. They told me to stop, but I didn’t. Right when I got you breathin’ again, they knocked us both out. Baby, I don’t think anyone was tryin’ to keep you alive once we got to the hospital.”
“Oh,” she says. “They didn’t even try? I thought- I don’t know, I guess I thought they at least tried, and they thought I was beyond saving, so they decided to- you know.”
“Well, I don’t know for sure, or anythin’, but I’ve got a feeling they knew they were gonna kill you a long time before we even got to Utah.”
“Well, fuck them, then.”
“Somethin’ we can agree on,” Joel mumbles, patting her on the shoulder. “Alright, you’re all good.”
She shuffles in a half circle to look at him, absentmindedly running her index finger and thumb over one of the braids. “Thanks,” she says. “Not just for the hair. For, uh, saving my life, too. Like a lot of times.”
“Kiddo,” he says, leaning forward to press a kiss to the top of her head. She immediately settles herself into a hug. “Thanks for savin’ mine.”
“Only that one time, though,” she replies, cheek pressed against his chest.
She’s talking about Colorado, but Joel’s mind flashes to Boston, where she came crashing into his life and refused to leave. To Lincoln, where she read Bill’s letter in that uncharacteristically genuine voice and kept him from feeling the depth of his grief with that stupid fucking porn magazine. To Kansas City, where keeping her safe became all he cared about.
To Salt Lake City, where she didn’t make him say goodbye to another daughter.
“Oh, baby girl. You have no idea.”