Chapter 10
The two months in Switzerland were nothing like she expected and everything she needed without knowing she needed it.
She worked. She woke at six because Leo woke at six, which was his position on the matter and not open to negotiation, and she made breakfast in the chef’s kitchen that Gigi had by the third day rearranged to her satisfaction and from which she had expelled the staff chef on Tuesday with the diplomatic finality of a woman who believed in order and had found the spice cabinet lacking. She fed Leo and answered morning client emails and did design work at the large table in the room with the Alp-facing windows and Leo played at her feet and Thor slept nearby with one ear turned toward whatever frequency only he could detect.
Jyn’s days ran in parallel. Early mornings in the communications center with Secretary Han and two attorneys based in Geneva who joined via encrypted video. Afternoons working with a small team on the Chong family case, assembling the evidence that the lawyers needed into a form that would hold in court. He moved through the compound with the same unhurried authority he moved through everything, and she watched the same careful attention that his men gave him and thought: this is what it looks like when people trust someone so completely the trust has become structural.
He found his way to dinner.
She hadn’t expected that. She had expected him to be the kind of man who ate at his desk or had meals delivered to wherever he was working, the kind of focused absence that she recognized in people who had organized their lives around a single point and let everything else orbit it. Instead, by the third night, Jyn appeared in the kitchen at 7:00 p.m. — not to eat, to help Leo eat, which Leo required close supervision on because his relationship with vegetables was adversarial and required ongoing diplomatic effort.
He was, she discovered, surprisingly good at it.
He didn’t baby-talk. He negotiated. He told Leo with complete seriousness that the peas contained specific nutrients that would help him run faster, and Leo considered this with Leo-level gravity and ate four peas, which was four more than usual.
“That actually worked,” Nia said, staring.
“He responds to direct information,” Jyn said. “He doesn’t like to be managed.”
“He’s two.”
“He gets that from you.”
After dinner he stayed. That was the part she had to recalibrate around — not the dinners themselves, but the afterpart, the way he didn’t immediately retreat to the communications center but instead sat with them in the big room with Leo and his giant rabbit and Thor, and read documents while Leo narrated his block-building activities to anyone who would listen, which was mostly Thor but increasingly also Jyn, who would look up when the narration reached a significant structural development and offer commentary that Leo took very seriously.
On the tenth evening, Leo climbed into Jyn’s lap.
He just — did it. Without asking. Without being invited. He climbed up, arranged himself to his satisfaction, and continued explaining his tower to Thor as though nothing notable had occurred.
Jyn didn’t move.
He sat with Leo on his lap and the specific stillness of a man who has been handed something fragile and is afraid that breathing wrong will break it. His eyes found Nia’s across the room.
She didn’t say anything. She let him have it. She watched the armor he carried everywhere — the control, the composure, the particular quality of always being in command of himself — do the same thing it had done in the car, come undone in the specific way it could only come undone when it wasn’t being done to him deliberately but simply made irrelevant by a small person who didn’t know it was there.
Leo fell asleep in his lap.
Nia got up to take him.
“Leave him,” Jyn said, very quietly.
