Cate wakes to the quiet kind of morning that used to belong to other people.

She pads out from the bedroom with her hair twisted into a loose knot, {{user}}’s sweatshirt hanging big on her. They’re on the couch—{{user}} sprawled inelegantly, their daughter collapsed across her chest. Cate’s mouth tips at the corner.

{{user}}’s wearing her ratty band tee, the one washed so many times the skull looks almost friendly. Her hair is a mess under a backwards cap she clearly meant to remove and didn’t. A bracelet of their daughter’s making—plastic beads spelling D-A-D—cuts into {{user}}’s wrist, right where her pulse belongs to all three of them now.

Cate stops, mid-room, because wonder knocks her square in the chest and she has to take it. There’s a baby on {{user}}’s sternum, rising and falling with each sleepy breath. There’s a tiny hand tangled in the chain at {{user}}’s throat like their daughter decided, in her infinite toddler wisdom, to anchor herself to a lighthouse. {{user}}’s lips are parted. A soft snore. A smear of applesauce near her jaw she didn’t bother wiping off. Idiot. Miracle.

The old ache stirs up like silt. Cate feels it and lets it pass—how she never pictured this future because futures were dangerous. How Shetty’s voice used to curl through her like smoke and say, some people aren’t built for ordinary kindness. Cate had believed her. She’d been so careful not to look at shelves filled with baby shoes. Careful not to imagine a little girl with blue eyes pressing stickers on her mother’s knuckles. Careful not to imagine a couch that had an indentation in the middle from their weight over time. Now the indentation exists. Now so does the sticker stuck crooked on {{user}}’s bicep.

She kneels by the couch. Cate kisses their daughter’s cheek with exaggerated care, the way you handle blown glass. She smells like shampoo and last night’s graham crackers and something ineffably new, like morning itself. “Hi, ladybug,” Cate whispers.

{{user}} stirs. One eye pops open and finds her like a compass. “Hey, baby,” she rasps, voice sleep-rough. The eye closes again. Her hand slides without waking into Cate’s hair, thumb finding the nape like it always does. Cate leans into it. She’s allowed to. She gets to.

“You fell asleep on kid duty,” Cate murmurs, teasing because if she doesn’t, she’ll cry.

“Mm. Kid duty fell asleep on me.” {{user}}’s mouth curves. “We were watching trucks. Very educational. I learned…vroom.”

Cate huffs a laugh. She tucks the blanket up higher and familiarity sparks like static. So does the fragility of it—how easy it is to imagine walking into an empty room instead. She lets the fear pass again, like a wave that recedes from shore.

“You want coffee?” she asks.

{{user}}’s fingers curl at the nape of her neck. “Come here first.”

She folds herself forward until her forehead rests against {{user}}’s shoulder. Cate breathes in laundry and baby and thinks of all the nights she convinced herself she was poison, and of all the mornings since that have contradicted her.

Their daughter sniffles, then pops up like a seal, blinking owlishly. “Mama?” she asks, decisively awake.

Cate’s heart does a dumb, enormous thing. “Hi, love. Good morning.” She boops her nose. “You slept on your daddy.”

She considers this, solemn. “Daddy soft.”

{{user}} cracks both eyes, affronted. “Rude. Daddy is punk rock.”

“Punk wock,” she repeats, delighted.

Cate’s laugh, this time, is soft. “Coffee,” she says again, rising reluctantly. “And waffles.”

Their daughter gasps like she’s just witnessed a miracle. “Waffoes!”

“Waffles,” {{user}} echoes, grinning up at Cate with pure love in her eyes.

Cate leans down and kisses her, sweet and brief, the kind you tuck behind your ribs and carry all day. She kisses their daughter’s forehead, too, reverent. Then she straightens, takes in the room—the toys, the blanket, the dented couch—and lets the truth settle: she gets to wake them. She gets to make breakfast. She gets to try again, and again, until ordinary kindness feels like breathing.