Chapter 6

Grace peeked out from behind the sheer lace curtains of her room on the second floor of the Grover home. She had heard the sound of a truck door slam; had been expecting it all day. Upon confirmation that it was indeed Uncle Steve who had just arrived, Grace turned away from the window and shot a glance around the room, looking for a way to avoid the upcoming encounter. Realizing her temporary room had a door leading into the bathroom, she ducked into the safe haven and locked herself in.

'I've gotten nowhere with her, Steve. I mean, she's been polite and all, but she hasn't eaten anything and prefers to stay in her room, "if it's all right with you." Well, it's not all right with me, but I can understand that I might be a little intimidating for her. She doesn't know me that well. My kids know I'm a big teddy bear, but…"

Steve released a perplexed sigh. "It's okay, Lou, it's not you. Something happened last night between Danny and Grace that I haven't figured out. Danny and I haven't had a chance to talk much yet, but Grace was terrified; too scared to see him. I thought it was just the trauma of the accident, but…there's gotta be more to it. I've never known her to hide out and avoid contact before. Can you show me where she's at?"

Steve squared his shoulders and prepared for battle, even though he wasn't quite sure how one prepares for a confrontation with a thirteen-year-old girl. He had a feeling his SEAL training wasn't going to help him much with this engagement. Putting on his best "lovable uncle" face, Steve knocked gently on the bedroom door.

"Grace?" Hey, Gracie, it's Uncle Steve. I'd like to see you, give you an update on Danno. Can I come in?"

A muffled, "No. Go away," reached Steve's ears, causing him to pause and reexamine the situation. This was going to be harder than he thought, but he needed to take action. Licking his lips, he gave himself a slight nod of encouragement, and opened the door. "Grace, I'm coming in. We have to talk." He strode into the bedroom, stopping at the center, and pivoting 360 degrees. To his surprise, the room was empty. The pink bedspread was rumpled, but that was the only indication that anyone had even been in there.

"Gracie? Where are you?" An indistinct sound reached his ears from behind the closed door leading into what he imagined must be the bathroom. To his surprise, though, when he managed to unlock the door with the help of his pocket knife, expecting to find his niece, he instead discovered the bathroom window over the stool, wide open, lace curtain flapping in the Hawaiian trade wind.

Jeez, Danny! I'm chasing after your daughter as if she's a perp at a crime scene! What the hell happened last night?" Steve leaped out of the open second floor window, landing easily on the gently sloping roof of the house's veranda, following Grace's own escape route. Prepared to give chase to the girl he had himself trained for the Governor's fitness award, Steve slid off the veranda and came around the front of the house at full speed. He was stopped in his tracks, though, by the sight before him – a rather grim-looking Grover with his arm around a most unhappy, defiant, Grace.

When Grace looked up at Steve, she read the puzzlement and concern on his face. Just as she had the night before in the hospital, the young girl, wrung out from worrying all night about her father, finally gave in to her emotions. She ran hard at her uncle, almost bowling Steve over as she threw herself into his barely outstretched arms, sobbing out: "I'm sorry! I'm so sorry! He'll never forgive me!"

Steve found himself sitting on the couch with Grace in the Grover living room. He had managed to get her calmed down enough to walk inside, where Renee immediately handed her a bottle of juice.

"My goodness, child, you look completely done in! I'm going to fix you a sandwich." Throwing an exasperated look at her towering husband, standing in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips, and a deep scowl on his face, Renee threw a quick request his way. "Lou, I can use your help."

Startled out of his unintentionally overbearing glare, Lou sputtered, "What? Why? You know how to make sandwiches by yourself…Oh."

Renee had given him the "You will do as I say and you will do it now look." Grover had seen it many times over the course of their married life and he knew you did not argue with the "look." He promptly followed Renee out of the living room, giving Steve the freedom to discuss Grace's unaccountable behavior since he'd first found her in the hospital chair the night before.

Uncle and niece sat together in silence for what stretched into minutes. Steve thought giving Grace a chance to calm down would eventually lead her to ask about her father. He was wrong. The silence eventually became uncomfortable, especially since Grace refused to look his way. She sat ramrod straight, both legs held tightly together with her feet primly anchored to the floor. Her hands were clutched so hard in her lap that she was white-knuckled. Her features, on the other hand, were blank. She looked straight ahead at the clock ticking on the opposite wall with dull eyes, and expressionless lips turned down slightly at the corners. It looked, for all the world, as if she was waiting for the axe to drop and end her life as she knew it.

Steve was unnerved. He didn't have the slightest idea how to approach Grace without possibly causing irreparable damage.

"Dammit, Danny, what am I supposed to do? Maybe I should have told you about Grace this morning. Maybe I should have been around when Mary was a teenager, I might have had an idea of how to deal with this!"

"Does he hate me?"

Steve was flung out of his reverie by those four words spoken in barely a whisper. When he looked over at Grace, one single tear was sliding down her cheek – the only outward change in her demeanor.

"Of course he doesn't hate you, Grace, why would you even think that, sweetheart?" Grace had been stuck on the thought that her father must hate her ever since Steve first found her in the hospital corridor. It was time for him to end this. He pried her stiff hands apart, and grasping both of them in his own, he looked at her intently until she finally returned the gaze.

"Grace, let me tell you how your father is doing." He could feel her body tense through her hands. He heard her sharp intake of breath. She was preparing for the worst, but Steve knew what he had to tell her would change her fear to joy.

Steve smiled warmly at her and gave her hands a little shake. "Hey, Grace, it's okay. Your dad is going to be fine. He looks a little funky at the moment, but he'll heal. That's where we come in, right? Nursing him back to health? Why don't we go see him right now? I know he wants to see you."

There! Steve had said the right things, he was sure. Everything would be fine. He stood up, expecting the usually exuberant Grace to jump up and run to the door. When it didn't happen, Steve sat back down on the couch.

"Grace?"

"See me? What about his eyes. He's blind, isn't he!

"Is that what you've been worried about? That he was going to be blind?" Realizing that that had been his exact same fear earlier, Steve thought he was finally beginning to understand Grace's heartache.

"His eyes were shut. They were swollen so big he couldn't open them, couldn't see me, but he kept asking me if I was okay. Why was he worrying about me?"

Steve was confused. "Well, Grace, of course he was worried about you, especially since he couldn't see for himself that you were okay. He's your father, you know."

"But he's blind! He won't see Charlie grow up! He won't be able to coach him in baseball or football! He's going to have to have someone take care of him forever, and he won't be able to be on Five-0 anymore. Of course he hates me!"

Grace was shouting and crying at the same time, lashing out at Steve with her fists. She seemed furious that he hadn't managed to figure it out for himself.

Steve grabbed a hold of her arms and gave her a little shake. "Grace! Grace, stop." She was strong, given how petite she was, and continued to try to throw punches at him until, finally, Steve just wrapped his arms around her torso and held her close until her trembling body gave up and she melted into his chest.

They were sitting like that, holding each other close, when Renee came into the room carrying a tray of sandwiches. She set them down on the coffee table, and silently backed out of the room.

Steve took the opportunity to break the intensity of the moment. "Hey, these sandwiches look good! I'm starved. Want one?"He asked as he bit into a chicken salad. Grace looked up, shrugged, accepting the sandwich offered to her. They ate in companionable silence for a few minutes.

"I didn't want to be with Danno this weekend." Grace had finished half of her sandwich before she started talking. "It's the first big football game of the year, and my friends had invited me to go to all these fun things, and I really wanted to go, but I knew Danno wouldn't let me. Sometimes, I get so tired of having a police officer for a dad. He thinks everything is dangerous and going to end up bad," Grace sighed as she took another bite of her food. "I guess I was sulking pretty badly."

Surprisingly, Steve understood completely. For the first 15 years of his life, he lived with a cop for a father, too. There were many times, especially in high school, where his father actually vetted his friends and their families before letting him spend the weekend, or go to a party. It's not easy, or comfortable, having a cop for a parent, but what Steve realized in this moment, was just how difficult it is to be a good cop and a good father, too. In their line of work, Danny was put routinely into situations that ordinary police officers rarely, if ever encounter. They've seen children kidnapped and murdered, they've found the remains of victims of violent death, and seen the ravages of drug abuse in young lives. It has to be unquestionably hard for someone of Danny's paternal nature to go home at night and not be scared to death to let his children out of his sight, and yet not be a completely smothering parent at the same time.

Steve settled into eating a second sandwich as Grace continued, "I was giving Danno a hard time after I found out my friend's mom couldn't bake her special Bundt cakes for our class bake sale today. I mean, I know it wasn't his fault, but I acted like it was. I kind of took it out on him. He decided he would bake the cakes himself, to make me happy."

Grace looked up at Steve with a tiny smile, and shrugged, "Danno doesn't really know how to bake."

Steve came very close to spitting his sandwich out, "Oh, you're not telling me anything I don't already know, Gracie!" Uncle and niece shared a moment of simple camaraderie together, both knowing the man they were discussing very well.

"I don't really know what happened in the kitchen, Uncle Steve," Grace continued. "We…uh…we had a disagreement. I was so mad... and I kinda ran off into my room. The next thing I knew, I heard Danno yell my name and when I came out I saw smoke coming from the kitchen. When I ran to the door and looked in, I saw smoke and flames coming out of the oven. I grabbed the fire extinguisher and put out the flames. When I saw him sitting on the floor next to the stove, I was so scared because Danno looked so bad, and then when he couldn't see, but kept asking me if I was okay… I was fine. He shouldn't have been worrying about me," Grace sadly shook her head.

"Grace, you were spectacular, you know that? If you hadn't kept your cool, the whole house might have burned down, and we could have lost your dad. Whatever happened before the fire doesn't matter, because you're okay, and you were there to save him. That's all that's going to matter." Steve gave Grace another hug. "What do you say we go see him now?"

Grace looked up at Steve once again. There was fear in her eyes, but Steve could see she was ready this time.

"Okay," she said, "let's go."

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"Remind me to never, ever, ask you to bake anything for me, brah! A Bundt cake is not worth burning down my kitchen!"

Steve and Grace rounded the corner of the hospital corridor in time to hear Kono's gentle ribbing, and Chin's happy chuckle, emanating from Danny's room.

A raspy-sounding Danny assured Kono it was not likely to happen anytime soon, his Neanderthal partner undoubtedly would keep him from even looking at an oven.

Steve smiled brightly at Grace, as they stopped outside, noticing she had gotten more withdrawn as they got closer to her father's room. He worried that she was getting scared about facing Danny again. "Are you ready, Grace? It's going to be fine, you know."

"Yeah, I know, Uncle Steve." Taking a deep breath, straightening her spine to look more like the cool and confident president of her 8th grade class, Grace pushed open the hospital door and walked into her father's room.

"Hey, Dad. How's it going?"

The room stilled, everyone taken aback by the rather nonchalant attitude of the young girl the team knew had always idolized her father.

"Grace! Are you okay, baby? I'm glad you're here. Come and give me a hug." Danny, still unable to see much out of his swollen slits, didn't pick up on the tension in the room, as happy as he was to have Grace with him.

"Well, I didn't have much choice. Uncle Steve told me I had to come see you and I missed the football game, anyway."

The smile on Danny's cracked lips faltered just a bit. Steve's scowl deepened in puzzlement. The cousins were outright shocked. No one quite knew what to make of the situation.

"Grace…? Steve began, a touch of caution in his voice.

She threw him a look of daggers and proceeded to flounce down on the edge of her father's bed.

"You did it this time, Dad. Mom's not ever going to let you have Charlie stay over now!"

"All right, that's it, young lady…apol…," Steve couldn't believe the change that had taken over Grace. He hadn't seen this one coming at all, and he was trying to set his niece straight, when Danny interrupted him.

"It's okay, Steve. Uh…would you guys mind giving Grace and I a little time alone, please?"

"Sure, Danny. No problem, brah. You heal up, and we'll see you soon." Chin ushered a stupefied Kono towards the door, giving Steve a little nod to follow.

Steve didn't want to go, but he realized it was the right thing to do. His partner knew his daughter better than anyone, and he would know how to handle this situation. He just hoped Danny was strong enough, at the moment, to take on this two-headed teenage monster!

Heading out the door, he turned and spoke directly to Grace, "I'll wait for you in the lobby, Grace. Take as long as you need."

"Thanks, Steve." Danny sighed, taking a small sip from the cup of water he had been holding. He waited until he heard the door slide completely shut, and they were alone.

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