With her daughter finally asleep, Cayenne took her place next to Zeki. While the rest of the house felt like it was vibrating with chaos, Zeki was unnervingly still. He kept flipping pages with mechanical precision, his eyes never moving across the lines of text. The faint, crystalline remnants of tears were the only proof he'd broken at all. He held himself together with a brittle kind of strength, terrified that if he let a single word out, the whole family's composure would shatter along with his.
Cayenne picked her son and placed him on her lap. "Thank you for being strong," Cayenne muttered as she hugged her son. "You are smart and strong, but you don't have to shoulder the world. You can seek attention. You can cry as loud as you can. You can be naughty. You can just be a child. Let us worry the world for you."
Understanding what his mother said, Zeki hugged her back in silence, her reassurance and comfort brought him peace, and eventually, he fell asleep.
