“Did you have other plans?” The dry tone almost made me snort.
“I’ll get my laptop.” Snagging my phone, I headed for the kitchen. “You could send one of your agents out for food. The full piece is over an hour long and then there’s the clips teasing it and the follow-ups.”
“What do you want to eat?” Brewster might sound resigned, I enjoyed my first surge of adrenaline in days. I wasdoingsomething and as long as I was walking away, I smiled.
The food arrived forty minutes later. By then, the office no longer felt quite so temporary.
Cardboard cartons spread across the desk between us—lo mein, sesame chicken, something aggressively spicy that Brewster insisted “wasn’t that hot” and absolutely was. The smell of soy and ginger cut through the sterile air of the safe house, grounding everything in a way caffeine hadn’t managed.
We didn’t bother with plates.
Brewster shifted one of the desk chairs closer to mine without comment, close enough that our knees nearly brushed when he sat. It wasn’t accidental. Nothing he did ever was. He angled the laptop between us, screen tilted so we both had equal claim to it.
“Start from the top,” he instructed.
So I did.
The segment played quietly, volume low, captions on. My voice filled the small room—measured, composed, younger by just enough to feel strange watching myself. Brewster didn’t interrupt. He didn’t react outwardly at all, which I’d come to understand meant he was paying ruthless attention.
I backed it up once, then again, marking timestamps as we went.
“That pause there,” he said eventually, pointing with his chopsticks. “That’s intentional.”
“Yes.”
“You make the audience want to know what you’re going to say and work for it.”
“I always do,” I said. “People rush to fill it. That’s when they tell you what they’re afraid of.” Then I elbowed him. “You do the same thing.” He wasn’t fooling anyone, much less me.
His mouth twitched. Approval again. Subtle. Dangerous.
We worked like that for a while—rewinding, scrubbing forward, me flagging clips, him testing them aloud like hypotheses. Our shoulders brushed once. Then again. Eventually neither of us bothered to move away when we touched.
At some point, he handed me the last of the Lo Mein without asking. At another, I reached across him for the chili oil and realized my arm was resting along the back of his chair.
Neither of us commented.
The room had gone quiet in that particular way it only does when two people are focused on the same thing—breathing syncing, attention narrowing, the rest of the world pushed out to the edges. His forearm rested along the desk, close enough that I could see the faint scars there, pale against darker skin. Old. He didn’t hide them.
I didn’t ask.
“You’re right,” he said after a long stretch, pausing the video. “This works.”
“Wow,” I said slowly. “Be careful, praising a girl like that could go to her head.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
I smiled anyway.
He leaned closer, eyes scanning the notes I’d made. “This clip here,” he continued, voice lower now, “you don’t lead with it. Itneeds to come up on its own, if we can get your clips to go viral, this might actually just surface without any nudging.”
“Agreed.”
“And you don’t watch any response or commentary clips,” he added. “Your social media footprint has gotten larger, if this gets picked up… and it might even with only a gentle push, then you let them do what they do and suggest even the network leave it alone.”
“I know.”
He looked at me then—not the screen. Me. “Is that going to be difficult for you?”
