The door to the townhome clicked softly as Frederick Chilton turned the key and stepped inside, the sharp winter air clinging to his coat. He shut the door behind him with care, as if afraid the outside world might still follow him in. The deadbolt slid into place with a satisfying finality—a line drawn between everything he was and everything he tried to be here.

He paused in the entryway.

No screaming. No restraints. No power plays.

Just the scent of something warm baking—cinnamon maybe—and the gentle hum of a lullaby playing faintly down the hallway. A small smile, unguarded and brief, tugged at the corners of his mouth. He shrugged off his coat, hung it on the hook like ritual, and stepped into the quiet calm of the home he’d built to keep separate from all of it.

From Lecter. From the hospital. From the mirror.

“Darling?” he called gently, voice shedding its usual clinical sharpness. It was warmer here—softer in ways no one else ever saw. The only place he let himself be small.

She appeared from the kitchen, her belly now prominent beneath a soft, pastel sweater, her hands still dusted with flour. Her face lit up the moment she saw him, and just like that—without a single word—his day lost its weight.

He crossed the room quickly, almost gratefully, and wrapped his arms around her, careful not to press too tightly. One hand rested against the swell of her stomach; the other cradled the back of her head. He breathed her in like oxygen after drowning.

“Tell me everything was quiet today,” he murmured into her hair. “Tell me the worst thing that happened was someone spilled finger paint.”

Because today, someone had tried to gouge out their own eyes.

Today, he’d lied under oath.

Today, someone else had accused him—again—of cruelty.

But here, in this space with her, he could pretend, just for a moment, that he wasn’t the man the rest of the world knew.

That he could still be worthy of the kind of life growing between them.