She stops laughing.
The transition is not gradual.
The amusement drops from her face like a curtain falling, replaced by an expression I haven’t seen before. Not in the academy. Not during our arguments. Not during the kiss. An expression that exists somewhere between disbelief and something else—something I can’t name because I’ve never seen Hazel produce it.
She stares at me.
For a long time.
The kind of long time that makes the monitoring equipment’s chirp feel intrusive, that makes the October light feel too bright, that makes the silence between two people feel like a room neither of them expected to enter.
“You remember all of that,” she whispers.
Not a question.
An observation. Made with the reverence of a woman who has discovered evidence of something she thought was lost.
I sigh.
“Why would I forget? You nagged me about it every day.”
“That was years ago, Roman.”
Her voice is quiet. The words carrying the weight of a woman who has spent those years assuming the things she’d shared with me had been discarded—filed underirrelevant, categorized as the disposable chatter of a twenty-year-old who hadn’t yet learned that dreams are the first thing the world takes from you.
I shrug.
“Well, I didn’t forget.”
Simple.
True.
I didn’t forget. Not Paris. Not the art. Not the ridiculous, detailed, apartment-hunting research she used to do on the library computers during our study sessions while I pretended to focus on tactical manuals and instead memorized the names of the arrôndissements she highlighted. Not the way she’d read passages from those romance novels out loud—quietly, under her breath, thinking I couldn’t hear—the ones about women who moved to European cities and found themselves in kitchens with good light and gardens with lavender and lives that were small enough to hold in your hands.
I remember every word.
Because she said them.
“Why would I forget something that was important to you?” I say. “What’s vital to you is vital to me, even if I hate your guts most of the time.”
She elbows me.
The contact is sharp, precise, delivered to the soft tissue between my lower ribs with the practiced accuracy of a woman whose combat training includes knowing exactly where to hit for maximum effect and whose affection includes deploying it.
“Fu—”
The air exits my lungs with the graceless urgency of a man who forgot, again, that Hazel Martinez expresses fondness through physical violence.
“—ck,” I finish, pressing my hand to my side, the bruised ribs from last night’s wall impact providing a chorus of protest to the fresh assault. “I keep forgetting you’re a bitch and can’t keep your hands to yourself. Ugh.”
The words are tender.
I know they don’t sound it. I know that to anyone listening—to Dr. Winters on the other side of the door, to any nurse monitoring from the adjacent room—this sounds like a man insulting a hospitalized woman who just elbowed him in the ribs. But Hazel hears what I mean. She’s always heard what I mean. Our entire relationship exists in the translation layer between what we say and what we intend, and the translation has never been wrong.
The room settles.
The amusement fades from her eyes like the last light leaving a window at dusk—slowly, reluctantly, replaced by something darker. Quieter. The expression that surfaces when the humor has done its work as an anesthetic and the wound beneath it starts to throb again.
