“You’re quiet,” he said.
I let out a slow breath. “You keep saying that like it surprises you.”
“It doesn’t,” he replied.
“Then why point it out?”
His gaze stayed on the road. “Because your silence changes.”
I turned slightly toward him. “How?”
“It means different things.”
“And right now?”
A beat.
“You’re recalibrating.”
The word landed with too much accuracy.
He was right.
I hated that he was right.
Something had shifted at Mabel’s table. A tilt in perspective. A softening of edges I had kept razor-sharp for years.
I had gone prepared to defend myself. Prepared to spar. Prepared to measure Cassian against my principles and find the fracture point.
Instead, I’d watched him dry dishes beside my aunt like it didn’t diminish him. I’d watched him answer her questions without flinching or posturing. I’d watched him refuse to be reduced to a caricature—of a hunter, of a man, of a threat.
And I had felt something inside me loosen.
Not my convictions.
But the way I held them.
I had always needed clarity to feel safe. Clear lines. Clear positions. Clear oppositions. If I knew where everyone stood, I knew how to move. I knew how to win.
But tonight hadn’t felt like a battlefield.
It had felt like … recognition.
I wasn’t trying to get ahead of him anymore. I wasn’t searching for the angle that would give me leverage. I wasn’t crafting the next question like a blade I could slide between his ribs.
I had simply watched him.
And seen him.
That was the recalibration. A shift from combat to awareness.
And that unsettled me more than any argument could have.
I looked away again, back to the dark stretch of trees sliding past. “You make recalibrating sound clinical.”
“It’s not.”
“No?” I asked. “What is it, then?”
