He shifted Paige to one arm and held out the other. Wendy stepped into it carefully because her incision, though healing, still reminded her not to move too fast. “You’re not bad for being triggered,” he murmured into her hair. “You’re injured.”
That distinction became a lifeline. Injured was real. Injured deserved care. Bad deserved punishment. Her parents had taught her to sort every wound into the second category.
As the weeks passed, Wendy learned more details about the house situation she had never asked to know before. Not because Mitchell hid things maliciously, but because he understood that surviving someone else’s chaos does not require total fluency in their paperwork. Still, after the porch, she wanted the full architecture.