Page 140 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
His gaze drops to Octavia, then back to me.
“If you care for her the way I think you do, then understand this. She does not need another man deciding for her what herpain means. She does not need worship. She does not need punishment. She does not need saving in the theatrical, bloody sense boys like you are often fond of.” One brow lifts slightly. “What she needs is someone who won’t disappear when she finally lets her weight rest.”
Every word feels aimed directly into the center of me.
Because disappearing is the instinct. Pulling back. Turning to distance the second something becomes too real to survive comfortably. The warning in him lands because it hits the same place my own conscience has been scratching at all night.
“She won’t always ask cleanly for what she needs,” Jacob says. “Sometimes she’ll push. Sometimes she’ll bleed before she speaks. Sometimes she’ll choose the wrong language for the right fear. That doesn’t make her hard to love. It makes her real.”
The room has gone so quiet I can hear her breathing change when she shifts slightly against me.
Neither of us moves.
“You being here,” he says, voice quieter now, “might be the first thing in a long time that reached her in a place I couldn’t.”
The sentence nearly undoes me.
Because that is not a gift. It’s a burden. A terrifying one. And the worst part is that some piece of me wants it anyway.
Jacob sits back again, studying me for a long second with the kind of look men use when they’ve decided they’ve said enough and now the silence has to do the rest.
Then, finally, he glances down at the daughter sleeping against me, and when he speaks again, his voice is softer.
“She hasn’t slept easy in years,” he murmurs. “Tonight she did.”
There is no defense against that.
No answer good enough.
All that comes out is the truth in its ugliest, simplest form.
“I don’t want to hurt her.”
The words are quiet enough that they almost sound like a confession to myself more than to him.
Jacob nods once, slow and thoughtful.
“I believe you,” he says.
The relief that brings is so sharp it almost feels like pain.
Then he ruins it properly.
“That doesn’t mean you won’t.”
Nothing in me argues with that.
Because he’s right about that too.
He rises from the chair after that, slowly, every movement measured so she doesn’t wake. At the edge of the room, he pauses with one hand on the doorway, looking back at us with wide eyes.
“If fate put you both in the same house,” he says, “then all I care about now is whether you prove worthy of it.”
Turning to leave, he pauses, looking back at us, at Octavia asleep on my chest, my hand still buried in her hair. Something in his face shifts into a kind of tired tenderness that hits harder than any warning could have.
“I may be your uncle, Silas,” he says quietly, “but she is my baby girl. Never forget that.”
The words don’t come out possessive in the cheap, fatherly way men sometimes use to puff themselves up. They come out protective. A reminder that before she was mine to ache for, she was his to worry over, his to lose sleep over, his to help stitch back together when the world split her open.
