I shut off the water and stood there for a moment longer than necessary, hands braced against the tile, letting the last of the steam cling to my skin.
Waiting had never been my strength.
Waiting was where momentum bled out quietly. Where someone else decided when the window closed. I’d learned that early—learned it the hard way. If you hesitated, the narrative moved on without you. If you waited, then suddenly you were reacting instead of shaping.
That was the justification, anyway.
The truth was messier.
I dried off, wrapped myself in a towel that smelled faintly of bleach, and caught my reflection in the mirror. Flushed. Focused. Wired in that brittle way that didn’t read as exhaustion until it cracked.
I looked like someone who’d gotten away with something. That thought made me pause for a beat. Maybe that was the problem.
Flint wasn’t wrong to be angry. He was wrong about the fact he could or should control the story and the clearance, but hewasn’t wrong about the consequences. I’d cut around him, not because I wanted to undermine him, but because I didn’t trust him not to slow me down.
That wasn’t nothing.
In light of Brewster’s habit of just walking in when he wanted to, I stayed in the bathroom until I was dressed. Soft clothes. Bare feet. Armor put away for the night. When I stepped back into the bedroom, the space still felt borrowed. Temporary—that word was getting under my skin.
There was a knock at the door a few minutes later. Not abrupt. Not tentative.
Brewster.
I opened it halfway.
“They’re bringing food in ten,” he said. “I told them something bland.”
“Wise,” I said. Then, before I could stop myself, “Thank you.”
He nodded once, as if he’d been expecting that and nothing more. He didn’t step inside. Didn’t lean. Didn’t fill the doorway the way he easily could have.
That restraint did something to me. Again.
“You don’t have to stay,” I said. It came out sharper than intended.
“I know.”
“Then why?—”
“Because tonight isn’t over for you,” he said quietly. “And you don’t decompress by yourself as well as you think you do.”
What the hell? I stared at him. “Is that an observation, Agent Brewster, or a judgment?”
“A pattern,” he replied. “One you manage well. Until you don’t.”
I should’ve bristled. Should’ve shut that down. Instead, I felt the truth of it land somewhere uncomfortably precise.
“I’m not asking you to fix anything,” I said.
“I’m not trying to.”
That again. That refusal to step into the role I half-expected him to occupy.
He shifted his weight, just slightly. “But I am here. If you want company. Or silence. Or someone to act like a buffer until you decide you don’t want one.”
He was offering to run interference with Flint. Guilt burned like bile at the back of my throat.
Because if I was being painfully honest with myself, I wanted the buffer. I wanted someone standing between me and whatever Flint decided to throw.
