Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
“The ghost. The failsafe. The one who watches from the corner.”
“Yes.”
“And now?”
“Now I’ve spent ten days sleeping three feet from you, crossing rivers with you, building things with you, watching you solve problems I couldn’t solve, and making choices I couldn’t make. The version of me that lived in the corner doesn’t exist anymore. You took him apart. Not by trying. Just by being yourself so consistently that the distance I was keeping started looking obviously, completely stupid.”
The corner of her mouth lifts. That almost-smile I’ve been tracking since the first day.
“Structurally stupid,” she repeats.
“Architecturally indefensible.”
“Engineeringly absurd.”
“That’s not a word.”
“It should be. We should petition.”
We’re doing the lighter thing that lives between the heavy conversations. The banter that isn’t just flirtation but the actual texture of two people who like being around each other in a way that makes a room feel smaller and warmer when both of them are in it.
She unfolds from the tight position on the bed, stretches her legs out, and leans back on her hands. The posture is open in a way she hasn’t been since the cabin, maybe longer. The posture of someone who doesn’t need to guard herself in this room.
“My turn,” she says.
“Go.”
“I’ve been in love with you since the diner. The one where I used to steal your fries. I was nineteen. You were sitting in the corner booth with your laptop and your coffee and you looked up when I walked in and for about half a second your face did something it never does. It opened. Like a door that’s usually locked. Then it closed again and you went back to the screen and I spent the rest of the night trying to make it happen again and failing every single time.”
“The fries.”
“The fries were strategy. If I stole your food, you had to look at me. Even if it was just to look annoyed. Annoyed was better than invisible. Anything was better than invisible.”
“You were never invisible.” My voice comes out raspy.
“I know that now. But I didn’t know it then. All I knew was that the man in the corner booth watched everyone else in the room and somehow never watched me, and the not-watching felt like the loudest thing in every room we shared.”
“I was always watching. I was just better at hiding it than you were at stealing fries.”
She laughs. A real laugh. Not the careful almost-laughs I’ve heard over the past ten days. A full, free sound that fills the small cabin and makes the golden light feel like it’s part of the moment.
I haven’t heard her laugh like this before. Ten days together—container, warehouse, safehouses, river, storage unit, breach, bank—and this is the first time. I want to hear it again. I want to hear it every day. I want to be the person who makes that sound possible.
“The Margaux decision,” she says. The laughter softens but doesn’t disappear completely. “I need to talk about it.”
“Okay.”
“I made the right call. I still believe that. The evidence package is solid because I didn’t leave a gap. Serafina is in custody with charges that will stick because the financial map is complete. But a nineteen-year-old girl is going to wake up soon to frozen accounts and federal investigators and the discovery that her mother used her college fund as cover for a criminal operation. And I did that. Not Serafina. Me. I’m the one who went through her records and pulled the thread that’s going to change her life.”
“You’re the one who put together the evidence that’ll put the person who hurt your brother in prison.” I pause. “You’re going to carry the Margaux weight for a long time. I’m not going to tell you not to. But I want you to know that carrying it doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you someone who takes the cost of her decisions seriously. That’s the kind of person I want beside me.”
She looks at me. The gold light. The lake behind her. The quilt. The room we were promised in a storage unit that feels like it belonged to a different lifetime.
“Beside you,” she says.
“If you want.”
“I want.”
I stand up from the chair, cross the room, and sit on the bed beside her. The mattress shifts under our weight. Sitting on an actual bed with real springs and real sheets and a quilt that smells faintly of lavender feels so different from every hard surface we’ve shared that it might as well be a different country.
I take her hand. The same hand that typed on my laptop, cracked encryption under pressure, and grabbed the front of my shirt in a storage unit. It’s warm and steady and fits in mine like it was always supposed to.
“I love you,” I say. The words come out the way everything important comes out of me: plain, direct, no decoration. Three words placed exactly where they need to be. Because that’s who I am. I don’t do speeches. I do exact words.