He checked the time. 9:22 PM.
They’d been talking for nearly half an hour. The party continued without him. His family was probably wondering where he’d disappeared to—or more likely, they’d simply accepted his absence as a Lincoln quirk, not worth examining.
Binary: I should return to the chaos.
Mercury: The chaos. Right. Your annual gathering of humans. How many this year?
Binary: Approximately forty, including children.
Mercury: Forty people who love you. That’s not nothing, Binary.
Binary: I know.
Mercury: Do you? Because sometimes I think you forget that you’re someone worth showing up for.
The words hit harder than they should. Lincoln read them twice, three times, trying to find the appropriate response. Something witty. Something deflecting.
Instead, he typed the truth.
Binary: I remember more often than I used to. These conversations help.
Mercury: Then I’m glad. Go be with your people. Eat suspicious desserts. Tolerate children. I’ll be here tomorrow.
Binary: Tomorrow. 9 PM.
Mercury: Like clockwork. Like postal workers. Like two very weird stars that somehow ended up in the same orbit.
Binary: Binary stars don’t orbit each other randomly. They’re gravitationally bound. They couldn’t separate even if they wanted to.
Mercury: Is that a metaphor?
Binary: It’s astrophysics. But it can be both.
Mercury: Stay strange, safety.
Binary: Stay safe, stranger.
The chat window went quiet.
Lincoln sat in the small, cold room for another minute, reading back through their conversation. The absurd bits and the tender bits and the places where they’d said something real without quite saying it.
He could find her.
The thought surfaced as it always did—unwanted, undeniable. He had the skills. He had the tools. Somewhere out there, Mercury existed as a real person with a real name and a real life. She drank tea by fires and read Dickens at Christmas. She worried about robins and quoted both Jane Austen and Dr. Seuss.
And made him feel less alone in his own head than anyone he’d ever met in person.
He could find her.
He wouldn’t.
Some mysteries were sacred. Some connections existed precisely because of the space around them—the things left unsaid, the boundaries that protected the tender places where trust lived.
Mercury trusted him. And that trust was worth more than answers.
Lincoln closed his laptop, tucked it under the bed like he’d been doing for two and a half decades, and went back to the party.
The main room had shifted in his absence. The dinner food had been cleared away and soon everyone would be starting on desserts. The music had changed to something slower, and in one corner, his parents were dancing. Not formally—just swaying together, his father’s arms around his mother’s waist, her head against his shoulder.
