“How do you know that?”
“I could tell immediately by the way she let you hold her. How she settled into you when you carried her, didn’t hold herself stiff. How she wanted you in the room even when she was about to be examined by a doctor.”
“I see.”
“So, yes, be the ear she needs. Don’t push her to talk before she’s ready. Just…be present. Be consistent. Let her set the pace.”
Lincoln absorbed this. Consistency, he could do.Patience was manageable. But the rest of it—the emotional navigation, the subtle cues he always missed?—
It was as if Annie could read his mind. “You can do it.”
“What if I make it worse? Say the wrong thing?”
“Then you apologize and try again.” Annie picked up her medical bag. “She’s not made of glass, Lincoln. She survived something terrible. She’ll survive you being awkward.”
That was maybe the best news he’d heard all night.
After Annie left, Lincoln retreated to his command center. He should sleep. He knew this objectively. His body had been awake for over twenty-four hours, and the cognitive effects of sleep deprivation would begin affecting his judgment soon. He’d read the studies. He understood the data.
But sleep had never come easily to him. As a child, he’d driven his parents to exhaustion with his inability to shut down. His mother had tried everything—rigid bedtimes, white noise machines, weighted blankets. Nothing worked. His brain simply didn’t know how to stop processing.
Eventually, they’d accepted it. “Lincoln runs on different fuel,” his father used to say, not unkindly. Now, at thirty-two, Lincoln had learned to function on four or five hours a night. Sometimes less.
Tonight would be less.
His monitors glowed in the dimness, cycling through their usual displays. Security feeds. Market algorithms. Communication channels.
On the third screen from the left, the dark web portal sat silent, their forum empty. For the first time in days, that didn’t bother him.
He checked his government contacts out of habit. Everyone had seemed to calm down. Treasury was no longer emailing him every hour. Homeland had reduced toeleven voice mails an hour. The FBI had filed away the anomalous access as “suspicious but noncritical.” Everyone seemed to have accepted his assessment: reconnaissance, not breach. Window-shopping.
Lincoln didn’t have the bandwidth to care about federal agencies right now.
His attention kept drifting to the security feed in the upper right corner. The camera showed the hallway outside the guest room—the door closed, the corridor empty. She hadn’t come out. It had been nearly three hours since he’d left her there.
Was that normal? Should he check on her? He had no frame of reference for this situation. No protocol forwoman you’ve talked to for two years online is now traumatized in your guest room.
Morgan.
Her name was Morgan.
He said it out loud, testing the shape of it again. “Morgan.” It suited her, somehow. Strong and soft at the same time. A name with weight.
He let himself think about her face.
Auburn hair. Green-hazel eyes that had found his in the darkness of that warehouse. The particular architecture of her features—the line of her jaw, the curve of her cheek, the way her mouth had shaped his name.
Binary?
She was beautiful.
The thought felt inadequate. Beauty was a category he’d never paid much attention to—an aesthetic judgment that seemed irrelevant to most of his concerns. But looking at her had done something to him. Rearranged something fundamental.
He had enough information to find out everything about her now. Her real name, her location, some history.He could cross-reference the details she’d given him—Montana, librarian, conference—and have a complete dossier within minutes. That was what he did. That was how he understood things. Knowledge was control.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard.
Then he pulled them back.
