I brushed my teeth, splashed water on my face, and stared at my reflection for another beat.
“You’re fine,” I muttered to myself. “It’s just a city. It’s just a story.”
But my chest stayed tight.
I pulled on an oversized T-shirt and a pair of soft cotton shorts, then slid between the sheets. The mattress was too plush, the pillows too high, but the relief of horizontal was almost obscene. My body sighed, muscles unwinding in increments.
I set my phone on the nightstand, plugged it in, and checked the time.
10:42 p.m.
For once, I was in the same time zone as my parents. No middle-of-the-night calls from Syria or Kabul. No calculating whether my mother would be awake, whether my father would be coming off a shift at the mill, whether I’d scare them with the sound of gunfire in the distance.
I could call them now.
I didn’t.
Not yet.
Exhaustion rolled over me like a fog. I closed my eyes for a second, just to rest them, just to breathe—and was gone.
Dreaming. Remembering.
I was back in the heat.
Not Charleston heat—different heat. Dry and endless and sharp, like the sun was a blade pressed flat against my shoulders.
The canvas walls of the tent flapped faintly in the wind. Voices outside, low and tense. The smell of sweat and dust and something metallic that always seemed to cling to forward operating bases no matter how much you pretended otherwise.
“Emerson.”
His voice slid through the dream first. Low. Rough. Familiar in a way that punched straight through my chest.
I turned, and there he was.
He looked like he always did in my memory—taller than he had any right to be, dark hair cropped short, jaw shadowed with stubble. Uniform half unbuttoned at the throat like the rules didn’t quite apply to him.
They never had.
He watched me from the other side of the tent, eyes scanning my face like he was checking for cracks. Like I was one more piece of intel he needed to assess before the world went to hell.
“Got a minute?” he asked.
I did. I shouldn’t have. But I did.
My heart hammered as he stepped closer, feet silent on the packed dirt. The air between us grew tighter, heavier, like the molecules themselves knew what was coming.
“This is a bad idea,” I told him.
He smirked, just enough to flash the edge of a dimple I’d pretended not to notice for weeks. “Which part?”
“You. Me. In here. Alone.”
He stopped right in front of me. The tent felt smaller. My lungs did, too.
“We’re not alone,” he said. “There are guards outside.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
