Adelaide is not a warm and fuzzy person, as a rule. She isn't someone who seeks others with open arms, who involves herself in their woes or involves them in hers. Some might look and speculate that she's one of those people with a hard shell hiding a something delicate, one who has built up a tough exterior to protect something soft and vulnerable inside.
They would be wrong.
Her caring, where it happens, is deep and fierce and abiding and stubborn, but there isn't much soft about it even underneath the hard protective hide.
Archer Avery is one of the few who could attest to that. Adelaide doesn't know how Archer became so dear to her, exactly, but there's no denying it when she sees Jenkins, and her heart immediately does a roll in her chest. Of course she knows who sent him. Somehow thoughts of Archer, out there and probably worried about them, make this situation much more real. Archer, solid and reliable, respectable, upright. In many, many ways he is totally opposite the other people in her affections - except that one key concept of dogged, devoted loyalty.
As Jenkins gives his message, the whole of what she's lost out there in the Capitol really hits her all at once, and with a pang she realizes that there is some part of her that will be sad to never walk these halls again and say hello to people, good people, like Jekins, to never see the place where Charlie spent his first days and that sweet little nursery where Archer told the story of the Tinman, never cook in the kitchens peaceably in tune with Archer. There's plenty she won't miss, but much of what she will is connected to their stalwart Chief.
That sudden wave of sentiment means that when she crosses her cell to meet Jenkins, her smile is real and warmer than many of her smiles. She doesn't know how long she'll be here, doesn't know what she will go through before she gets out - though that she will get out is something she doesn't doubt - and so this gesture, thoughtful in every way, warms her.
"Don't know what I'd do without you fellas," she says, though probably she does. She would go brittle, without their warmth, like she was so well on her way to doing when she came here. "You tell him just seeing his face will do wonders for the both of us," she says. That doesn't mean she doesn't take up Jenkins' pen and jot down a couple things, still.
When Jenkins is gone Adelaide returns to her cot, Charlie in her lap with a bottle, and she opens up the baby book that Nina brought from the apartment. Pages woven together by her own hand, a pattern of birds in silhouette across the front, Adelaide has marked out the milestones of Charlie's short months in her curling script. She hasn't been able to be all the way honest, marking the days he met Rodeo with nothing more than a sketch of a pitbull puppy and a familiar trailer, marking the night Rodeo sang to them on the phone with some lyrics written out on the page. She's pinned in little mementos here and there, and a lock of hair from Charlie, from herself - and one from Rob. She runs her fingers over it and frowns. She doesn't know where Rob is, hasn't heard anything at all, though he ought to have been back from the hospital hours ago. She can only hope her warning diverted him, but she's hoping that Archer might somehow be able to tell her something, when he arrives.