Updated Apr 7, 2026 • ~9 min read
Chapter 6: Professor Buttons Meets a Teacher
Ryder
Carla calls at nine forty-seven, which is thirteen minutes before Emma’s third session.
He has his phone between his shoulder and his ear and his hands in the sink, washing up, and Carla’s voice is the voice she gets when she’s problem-solving rather than panicking — efficient, fast, already one step ahead of the inconvenience. “Luna’s backup fell through. I’m stuck until three. I know it’s your session morning. Can she come to you?”
“Send her,” he says.
“She has her bag. She has Professor Buttons. I told her to be good.”
“She’s always good.”
“She’s four, Ryder, she’s never good, she’s just strategic.” But there’s the smile in it — Carla’s smile sounds like exhaling. “I’ll be there by three.”
He dries his hands. Through the glass of the front door he can see Emma’s car pulling up.
This is fine. Luna is in his life; clients know he’s a father. This is normal and he will not treat it otherwise.
Emma comes through the door and he watches — he is, apparently, always watching, this is apparently something he is not going to stop doing — as she does her brief internal calibration of the space. She has started doing this less than the first time, the wide-eyed I’m-not-sure-I-belong-here micro-assessment, and more of simply arriving. She wears a thin navy henley today, loose, the kind that can be easily managed. She is learning the logistics. She is, he notes, continuing to get prettier in that layered way, the way that comes from knowing someone better.
He says hello. He says healing well, let me see. He checks the work — flawless, perfect healing, skin settled — and is aware of himself the way he is sometimes aware in the work, watching himself from a slight remove, noticing the extra second he gives to the check. He is not careless about this. He files it without comment and sets up for the session.
He is forty minutes into the sparrow’s wings — the finest part of the piece, each flight feather requiring its own shading pass, and he is in the particular focus that good detail work requires, the world narrowed to the inch of skin in front of him and the exactly-right pressure of the needle — when the front door bell rings and he hears the small sound of Luna dropping her backpack on the floor.
“Daddy.” Stated as a simple fact. He is Daddy; she has verified this; she is satisfied.
“Hey, little one. The blue chair, okay? And be quiet, I’m working.”
A pause in which she assesses the room, assesses Emma on the table, assesses the machine, assesses Ryder. Luna’s assessments are thorough. At four she has the evaluative gravity of a much older person, and it comes out in her face.
“Is it an owie?” she says.
“A little bit,” Emma says, and her voice has the quality it has when she talks about her students — present, full, giving whoever she’s talking to her entire attention. “But a good owie.”
“Those are the best kind,” Luna says, with authority.
Emma laughs — a real one, surprised out of her — and Ryder hears it and his hand, for one instant, is not quite steady. He breathes. He steadies. He keeps working.
Luna establishes herself in the blue chair with the solemnity of someone setting up a small office, arranging her backpack, extracting Professor Buttons — a grey rabbit, one ear slightly detached and re-sewn twice — and a picture book and a zip-lock bag of crackers. She is, as she always is, fully self-sufficient in small spaces.
Twenty minutes pass. Luna eats crackers. She holds Professor Buttons. She pages through the picture book at the rate of someone who has it memorized and is reading through the memory rather than the words.
Then: “Do you know any stories?”
This, directed at Emma. Emma, who cannot turn her head all the way around because of the angle of the work, says, “I know approximately four thousand stories.”
“That’s a lot,” Luna says, with appropriate respect.
“I’m a teacher,” Emma says. “It’s one of my main skills.”
“I’m going to school next year,” Luna says. “My friend Sofia already went and she says it has a slide.”
“Most good schools have slides.”
“Does yours?”
“We have two.”
Luna considers this. “I think I would like your school.”
“I think you would like it very much. Do you want me to read to you? Can you bring a book up here? I can hold it if you stand on the other side.”
Ryder watches this happen — Luna sliding off the chair, carrying her picture book with ceremony to the other side of the table, where Emma can see it without twisting, and Emma begins to read. She uses voices. Not the slightly condescending slow voices some adults use with small children but genuine character voices, differentiated and committed, the bear in the story sounding like a specific kind of gruff softness and the small rabbit sounding exactly like a small rabbit would, if rabbits could manage sentences.
Luna is completely enchanted. She stands beside the table with Professor Buttons tucked under her arm and her mouth slightly open.
Ryder keeps working. He is — he acknowledges it, plain, the way he acknowledges things — looking at Emma more than at the work, which is categorically a problem from a craft perspective, and categorically a different kind of problem from any other perspective, and Jax is watching him from across the room with the expression of a man filing evidence.
Emma finishes the first book and Luna immediately produces a second one from her backpack by a path that requires returning to the blue chair, selecting the book, and returning, all with the gravity of a small person who has decided something important. Emma reads this one too — a longer one, about a duck who moves to a city and finds it overwhelming and then finds the one person who makes the city feel like somewhere — and her voice is unhurried, and she pauses on the pictures the way a practiced reader does, giving Luna time to look.
The sparrow’s wings are done. He could stop here — the piece is complete in the sense that the technical elements are all present. But he takes one more pass on the far right wing feather, a deepening of the shadow in the primary that makes the whole wing lift slightly, that gives it the almost-motion, the about-to, the moment before.
He sets the machine down.
“Done?” Emma says.
“Done,” he says.
She turns, carefully, and looks at Luna. “I’ll have to stop there, bug.”
“That’s okay,” Luna says, in the generous tone of a duchess granting leave. “You can finish next time.”
There is, Ryder notes, an assumption of next time built into this that Luna did not check with either adult before deploying.
He wipes and wraps Emma’s ribs. He is aware of Jax behind him doing absolutely nothing useful, not working, not prepping, in fact absolutely still in the way of a person who is watching something they want to remember correctly.
“She’s great,” Emma says, low, while Luna is occupied with Professor Buttons. She tips her head toward the blue chair.
“She’s catastrophic,” he says, but the way he says it is not that.
Emma smiles. There’s something in the smile that he doesn’t analyze directly — he looks at the work instead, the wrapped ribs, the extraordinary finished thing under the film. One more session for any touch-up, for the shading finesse, for the small details that will make the piece perfect rather than simply done.
“Next session,” he says.
“Next session,” she says. And then she is looking at him with those brown eyes that have gotten, over three sessions, considerably harder to look at neutrally, and she says: “Luna asked me to finish the book.”
“I heard.”
“Is that — does she come in often?”
“No. Childcare thing. One-off.”
She nods slowly. “She’s exactly like a student I have. Named Callie. The same kind of — sureness. Of herself.”
“Luna has never doubted that she belongs anywhere she goes,” he says. This is completely true and it is, some days, the thing he is proudest of in his entire life. “I worked hard on that.”
Emma looks at him. The look lasts a beat longer than looks usually last. “I can tell,” she says.
He walks her to the door. Jax has, mercifully, found something to do with himself on the far side of the shop. Luna has fallen asleep in the blue chair with Professor Buttons under her chin.
The afternoon light comes through the front glass of Black Atlas at a low October angle and it lands across Emma’s shoulder as she pulls on her coat, and Ryder watches it and doesn’t say any of the things he is not saying, and she goes, and the door closes.
Jax says, from across the room, absolutely without preamble: “You’re so in trouble.”
“Mind your business,” Ryder says.
“I’m in your business by definition,” Jax says. “I work here. Also I have eyes.”
Ryder says nothing. He crosses the shop and lifts his sleeping daughter carefully — she makes a small sound without waking, tucks her face against his neck — and holds her warm weight against his chest and stands in the middle of his shop and thinks about a teacher who reads in three different voices and doesn’t make a big deal about any of it.
He is in trouble. Jax is not wrong. He has the sense of standing at a ledge again, the way he has at the beginning of the best and most complicated things in his life, looking down at the drop and knowing already — already, before the decision — that he is going to jump.
He just doesn’t know when.
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