Penn didn’t see me, but she felt me.
I could tell by the way her shoulders softened for half a second, like some part of her knew I was close.
I put my hand on the glass.
She steadied.
My girl. My writer. My storm.
And her moment was coming.
The world just didn’t know it yet.
I watched her through the glass like a man watching the tide decide whether to return to him or swallow the shore whole.
Penn didn’t see me. But her body felt like a radio tuned to a frequency I knew by heart. Her knee bounced, sharp and nervous. Her lips pressed tight. Her fingers hovered at her mouth before she caught herself, curling them around the warm paper cup instead.
Carrie didn’t speak. Didn’t blink. Didn’t even shift in her chair.
She read the first page like a judge reading the final testament of a defendant she wasn’t sure she wanted to save. Her brows tightened over the second paragraph. Then softened on the third. Then went flat—unreadable, impenetrable—by the fourth.
Penn’s breath quivered in her chest.
This woman had written exposés that turned politicians into dust. She’d won awards without blinking. She’d tornmanuscripts in half and thrown them back at their writers with nothing more than a raised brow.
But she had never—not once—read one of Penn’s pieces silently for this long.
I watched the moment Penn started to fracture. The way her throat bobbed. The way she exhaled a thin, sharp breath, like it scraped its way out of her ribs.
I couldn’t stay across the street another heartbeat.
I crossed before the light changed. Up the steps. Through the glass doors. Into the elevator. And down the bright hallway where the air always smelled faintly of lilies and Carrie’s perfume—the expensive one she claimed made her feel like a woman who “could slam a courtroom door with her hips alone.”
Penn didn’t hear me. Not until I stepped into Carrie’s glass cube.
She let out the breath she’d been strangling.
I bent and kissed the top of her head, my lips sinking into her hair like home.
Her shoulders dropped. Her fingers stopped tapping. Her body leaned the barest degree toward mine—a confession she never had to say out loud.
I sat on the black leather couch across the room. A shaft of sun split the glass, catching dust motes and turning them into tiny, floating galaxies between us. Penn kept her eyes on Carrie. But her pulse calmed. I saw it in the way her jaw unclenched. In the way her chest moved again.
Carrie flipped to the last page.
Penn’s hand tightened around her fisted hem of her shirt. Her leg jumped twice. Then stilled completely.
Carrie’s expression didn’t crack. Not a muscle. Not a twitch.
She placed the papers down slowly, deliberately, aligning the corners perfectly like she was preparing a sacred object for burial.
Then she closed her eyes.
Penn choked on her breath. I stood halfway from the couch, ready to go to her, but she lifted one fragile hand in a don’t move just yet that shattered me and steadied me all at once.
Carrie kept her eyes closed a moment longer.
It felt like eternity lived inside those seconds.
