He hadn’t left anything that would trigger alerts or monitoring or frantic meetings.
He’d edited my words. Not changing them. But responding to them.
I scrolled back up. Checked the metadata. The audit trail.
Nothing.
No user attribution. No timestamp anomaly. The system treated the annotation like it had always belonged there—like it had been part of the transcript the entire time.
Like a footnote history hadn’t noticed yet.
The kitchen felt suddenly too bright. Too exposed. I glanced toward the hallway without thinking, half-expecting Brewster to be there already, watching my face.
He wasn’t.
Which somehow made it worse.
Because this wasn’t meant for anyone else.
This wasn’t spectacle.
This was private.
A continuation.
My stomach tightened—not fear exactly, but something colder. Recognition. The unmistakable certainty that he hadn’t broken silence because he was angry.
He’d broken it because someone else had tried to end the conversation.
And he wanted it back.
I closed the file carefully. Didn’t delete anything. Didn’t forward it. Didn’t react.
I just stood there, listening to the house hum around me, aware with sudden, crystal clarity that whatever control the network thought it had just asserted was already gone.
Somewhere down the hall, a door opened.
Footsteps.
Brewster.
I didn’t call his name.
I waited.
I didn’t move when the footsteps stopped outside the kitchen. I’d learned a great deal about Brewster over the past few days. The way he moved. The way he listened. The way he assessed a room before he entered it, even if it was only for a split-second. If we’d been anywhere else, I might have called my observations obsessive.
Particularly with how he could and often did capture my attention merely with his presence. Being locked together in this house, even with the other agents coming and going—Brewster was the only constant. I had no choice but to get to know him, to get used to him, and on some levels, eagerly anticipate his arrivals.
“You’re quiet,” he said.
No greeting. No easing into it. Just the observation delivered like he’d felt the moment my attention shifted, like it had tugged on something already threaded between us. My pulse answered before I did. I liked that he didn’t pretend conversations had beginnings or ends with us. With Brewster, everything felt continuous—unfinished in the best way. As if we were alwaysmid-thought, mid-breath, and time was just an inconvenience that kept trying to wedge itself between us and failing.
I closed my phone screen and set it face-down on the counter. My hand lingered there a beat too long. “You finished your call.”
“Yes.”
His voice came from behind me—not close enough to touch, not far enough to ignore. I felt him there anyway, a solid presence at my back, familiar in a way that startled me. I didn’t stiffen. Didn’t step away. My shoulders stayed loose even as awareness sharpened, every nerve cataloging distance and weight and the quiet certainty that he would move if I needed him to—and wouldn’t if I didn’t.
