“What do you mean?”
The familiar dread curled in Morgan’s stomach. This was the part where people pulled away. Where they looked at her differently, like she was something strange and unsettling instead of just a person with an unusual brain.
She kept her eyes on her knees, unable to look at him. “I just—I can’t forget things. Anything. I read something once, hear something once, and it’s in my brain forever. Every conversation we’ve ever had, every book I’ve ever read,every face I’ve ever seen.” She swallowed hard. “It’s called eidetic memory. I’ve had it my whole life.”
The silence stretched between them. Morgan braced herself for the shift—the subtle withdrawal, the careful distance that always came when people realized what she was.
“That’s remarkable,” Lincoln said.
She looked up. His expression hadn’t changed. No wariness. No unease. Just that same focused attention, now tinged with something that looked almost like wonder.
“It’s not. Most people find it unsettling.”
He shrugged. “Most people find me unsettling.” He tilted his head slightly, considering. “Your brain processes and retains information with perfect fidelity. That’s not unsettling. That’s efficient.”
A laugh escaped her—watery and broken, but real. “Only you would call my freakish memoryefficient.”
“It’s not freakish. It’s extraordinary.” He said it like he was stating a fact, like there was no other possible interpretation. “You’re extraordinary.”
Morgan didn’t know what to say to that. Nobody had ever called her extraordinary before. Strange, yes. Unsettling, definitely. But not extraordinary. Not like it was something to admire instead of something to fear.
“Fair warning,” she said, her voice still thick with tears. “I can also tell you that the third book on the second shelf in this room is missing its dust jacket, and there are exactly seventeen ceiling tiles, and you have a small scar on your left hand that you got sometime before we met because I noticed it the first time you brought me soup.”
She hadn’t meant to say it. The words just fell out—her version of deflection, pointing at her own strangeness before anyone else could.
Lincoln glanced at his hand. “I was twelve. Soldering iron.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“I know. I wanted to.”
The tears started again—different this time, softer. Lincoln made a small, uncertain sound, and then his hand was on her shoulder. The touch was gentle, tentative, like he wasn’t sure he was allowed.
Morgan leaned into him before she could think better of it.
He froze. For one terrible second, she thought she’d made a mistake, crossed some line he hadn’t meant to offer. But then his arms came around her, slowly, carefully, adjusting until she was tucked against his chest.
The awkwardness faded almost immediately. He held her like she was something precious, something that mattered, his arms stronger than she’d expected and his heartbeat fast against her ear. He was nervous—she could feel it in the rapid pulse, the slight tension in his shoulders—but the tenderness was real. It wasn’t performance.
He smelled like coffee—dark roast, slightly burned, probably his third cup—and something clean. Unscented detergent. The particular absence of artificial fragrance. Ordinary smells. Safe smells. Morgan pressed her face into his shirt and let herself be held.
The shaking finally began to subside.
They stayed like that for a long time, neither of them sure how to disengage. Morgan could feel the rise and fall of Lincoln’s breathing, steady now, and the warmth of him seeping into her bones.
“In the box,” she whispered into his chest, “when it was dark and I couldn’t move and I didn’t know if anyone was ever coming—I recited our conversations. All of them. Inorder.” Her fingers tightened on his shirt. “You were the only thing that felt real.”
Lincoln’s arms tightened around her, just slightly.
“I thought you were gone for good,” he said, his voice rough. “When you didn’t respond. That you were done with…what we had.” He stopped. Swallowed. “I was going to delete everything. Our conversations. The forum. All of it. I had my hands on the keyboard when your message came through.”
Morgan let the weight of that settle over her. He’d been ready to delete everything. A few seconds earlier, and her message would have vanished into nothing. She’d still be in the warehouse. Still be in the box. Still be Randall’s filing cabinet, bleeding and memorizing data she didn’t understand, while no one came.
The thought made her chest tight. Not anger—she couldn’t be angry at him for almost giving up when she’d given him nothing but silence. Just the cold awareness of how thin the margin had been. How close she’d come to disappearing forever.
“A few seconds,” she whispered. “If you’d deleted it a few seconds earlier?—”
“I didn’t.” His arms tightened around her more. “I saw it. I came.”
