My phone vibrates again—longer this time, a call. I don’t look. If I look, I’ll choose a list instead of a person. Tonight, for four minutes that are already shrinking, I choose the person and trust the list to wait.
“I should—” I start.
“Wait,” he says, the word catching on the cold. His hand shifts again, knuckles barely scraping the vinyl seam. Not touching me. Touching the choice.
Three minutes. The city hums. Somewhere, a car door thunks. I tuck my chin into my scarf and let the warmth at our shared edge be the only rule I break until it isn’t.
A moth keeps punching the streetlight like it believes in reincarnation by bulb. I watch it because it’s easier than watching the way Jason’s glove doesn’t move the last half inch. The night holds its breath.
A flash pops across the street.
It’s small, contained—more pop than boom—but I feel it like a slap under my sternum. The kind of light phones make whenthey forget they’re not discreet. The kind of light that turns a bench into a headline.
Jason goes still beside me. My body does the opposite—every muscle zings hot, then cold. I don’t turn my head. I look at the storefront glass beyond the lot and catch the reflection instead: a hunched shape by a sedan hood, a rectangle of light rising and falling, the faint silver wink of a telephoto lens like an eye opening.
Another flash. Closer this time, or just braver. The moth startles into a new orbit; my stomach follows.
“Easy,” Jason says, barely a breath, because he knows I’m about to do something decisive and stupid like put myself between him and optics. He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t have to. We’re both measuring consequences in real time.
Training brain grabs the wheel. Variables. Angles. Exits. I clock the camera’s position relative to the bench, the spill of light, the reflection angles on the glass door behind us. If we stand now, we feed them motion. If we separate, we feed them story. If we sit, we feed them patience until they get bored.
They are not getting bored.
The lens glints again over the car hood like a periscope. A second silhouette shifts in the dark near the curb—tag-team, because of course. Somewhere behind the glass door I just came through, the tunnel’s human dam is leaking. I can hear the muffled whirl of voices and a boom mic being charmed past a security guard who needs a raise.
“What’s the play here?” Jason asks.
The directive in my pocket thrums like it wants to vibrate straight into my bones: No contact with Maddox on premises. The rulebook says don’t sit, don’t speak, don’t exist in the same frame. The human in my coat says I am already here.
Another flash. The image blooms on the inside of my eyelids without my permission: me and Jason bracketed by cheap vinyland a humming light, his hood shadowing a face everyone thinks they know, my head turned just enough to ruin me.
I think of Sophie throwing her body in front of microphones, of Miles with his jaw clenched around warnings, of Julia’s folder of terms and conditions with my life in bullet points. I think of Nolan’s eyebrows when he said discretion like it was a price tag. I think of Jason saying he’ll be boring and then not kissing me in the hallway until he did.
The moth goes for the bulb again. Brave. Foolish. Alive.
I stand in my head and run three scenarios. All of them cost something. The least expensive, for once, might be the one where we don’t let them frame the photo from across the street.
I lean the smallest fraction toward Jason, still not touching. “On three, we stand,” I say, so quiet I’m not sure I’ve spoken. “Back inside. No rush, no flinch. If they call out, we don’t look.”
He nods. I feel it instead of seeing it, the bench giving a ghost of our weight. The lens winks again, impatient.
I exhale and hear the word I choose to leave with the breath, not an order, not a plea—strategy asking for consent.
“Run?”
Chapter 12
Frozen Over
Jason
We don’t run.We stand like we’re going to. Then we don’t. We stand together, breathe once, and stand up slow like civilians who have nothing to hide. The flashes blink hungry across the street; we give them nothing but backs and winter.
I open the door and let Riley step through first. Cold folds over us, clean as a blade. Her breath ghosts into the night in quick, measured puffs—four, six, four, six—the cadence she uses when she’s turning nerves into science. I fall in half a step to her left and steer us down the side street that peels off the hotel like an escape hatch. Asphalt glints with thin ice where the city didn’t bother to salt. The river smell threads the air—metal, wet, distant snow.
“Left in ten,” I say, low. We don’t look at each other; we match shadows. The hotel hum fades behind us to a warm rectangle and then to nothing. The city is the kind of quiet that happens between weather.
We turn. No cameras on the corner—just a newsbox with last week’s headline and a flyer for a missing cat with cross-eyedcharm. A bus sighs two blocks over. Somewhere, a bottle rolls and comes to rest with a hollow clink. I tuck my hands in my pockets because if I don’t, they’ll find hers like they’ve been doing it for years.
