The office is loud in all the ways that don’t matter. Phones ring, chairs scrape, someone laughs too hard near the printers, and my inbox pings every thirty seconds like it’s personally invested in my productivity. The newsroom hums with that familiar, caffeinated urgency that usually makes me feel alive. But today, it feels like I’m underwater.
I sit at my desk, eyes on my screen, cursor blinking at the end of a sentence I’ve rewritten three times without changing a single word. The noise around me blurs into a dull, distant static, like my brain has turned down the volume on the world without asking permission. I can hear it all, technically. I just can’t feel any of it.
Three months.
That’s how long it’s been since Somalia. Since the smoke, the gunfire, and the moment James Smith stopped being a man and became something else entirely. A ghost, just like he said.
I tried to find him. God knows I tried.
I pulled every favor I have at the media house. Called in markers from editors, analysts, and people who owe Addison and me. I followed leads that went nowhere, names that dissolved into static, paper trails that ended abruptly like they’d been deliberately burned.
There was no James Smith. No photographer with that face, no musician who smelled like cinnamon and danger, and no record that survived even the lightest scrutiny. It was like he never existed at all.
If not for the life growing quietly inside me, I would’ve believed I made him up.
I shift in my chair, one hand instinctively dropping to my stomach, fingers splaying over fabric that’s only just beginning to feel tighter than it used to. The bump isn’t visible yet, not really, but I know it’s there. I feel it in the way my body has rewritten its priorities without consulting me. In the nausea that still sneaks up on me mid-morning, and the bone-deep exhaustion that no amount of coffee touches.
“Hey,” I murmur under my breath, more habit than intention. “You still with me?”
I rub slow circles, a grounding motion I’ve come to rely on. A ridiculous smile tugs at my mouth despite myself.
“Your dad,” I whisper, voice barely audible over the clatter of keyboards nearby, “is a ghost. Which feels… on brand, honestly.”
There’s a flicker of memory—James in motion, efficient and lethal in the way he moved through chaos like it was something he spoke fluently, like violence was just another language he’d mastered and then grown tired of. I see him again in my mind, standing amid wreckage, blood on his sleeve, those dark, bottomless eyes locking onto mine for one brief, unbearable moment.
The image fades, leaving behind that familiar ache—not sharp enough to cripple me, nor dull enough to ignore. I’ve learned to live with it, this quiet awareness that something enormous passed through my life and left me permanently altered in its wake.
A familiar presence settles at the edge of my desk before I hear her voice.
“You’ve been staring at that sentence for ten minutes,” Addison notes mildly. “Either it’s the worst line you’ve ever written, or you’re not actually here.”
I don’t look up right away. I already know what I’ll see: perfect posture, tailored blazer, hair smooth and intentional, eyeliner sharp enough to cut glass. She looks like someone who just won a Pulitzer and knows exactly why she deserved it.
“Can it be both?” I murmur.
She hums, noncommittal, and leans in closer. “The office is still riding the high, by the way. Marianne just got off a call with the main branch in New York. They’re still buzzing about the awards.”
Oh yes, the awards. Pulitzer winners. Plural. Said so casually now, it almost feels unreal, like it happened to other people wearing our faces.
“I know,” I reply softly. “It just hasn’t… landed.”
Addison watches me, really watches me, the way she always has, giving me her full attention. “It doesn’t have to. Not yet, at least.”
I finally glance up at her, and something in my expression must shift, because her tone becomes gentler. “You okay?”
I nod, then shrug, then nod again. “I’m fine.”
She doesn’t call me on the lie. She never does unless it matters. A beat passes. The newsroom hums around us, muted by the bubble we’ve always occupied so easily together.
“You know,” she smiles after a moment, “three months ago, if someone had told me we’d come back from Somalia with a Pulitzer and a crisis-level caffeine dependency, I’d have believed the caffeine part first.”
A laugh escapes me before I can stop it. It surprises both of us.
“There she is,” Addison grins.
I exhale, shoulders dropping. “I still half-expect him to walk in here,” I admit. “Looking for me because what we had meant something to him. Walk back into my life like he just… stepped out for a bit.”
Her jaw tightens, not with anger, but understanding. “You’re still looking,” she says, because it’s not a question.
