Gavin holds my gaze. Something moves in his expression — not agreement exactly, but the acknowledgment that he's heard me and is filing it. Then he makes another note.
Through the glass, the man who says his name is Jim is still looking at the window. Still patient. Still waiting. The pull between us runs slow and certain in my wrist.
I press my thumb against it and wait too.
***
He tells me his name in the common room two hours later, after intake, after Gavin's questions and Cal's preliminary assessment and the facility doing what it does with people who don't fit the standard categories. Dalton escorts me there and takes his position near the wall. Jim is already seated, a cup of coffee in front of him that he's been holding without drinking.
He looks up when I sit across from him. His eyes move to my wrist. To the marks. Back to my face.
He doesn't say anything about either.
"Jim," he says. Confirming something.
"Alex," I say.
Still looking at my face. Not reading threat — reading something else, something that takes its time. His eyes are dark and even and they don't look away from the parts of me I'm used to people looking past.
"You came yourself," I say.
"Yes."
"Why?"
He considers this. Actual consideration, not performance of it — visible in the quality of his stillness, which deepens when he's thinking rather than shallowing the way most people's does. "Jake's here," he says. A pause. "And it seemed like the right time."
I wait for more. He doesn't offer it.
I find I don't mind. There's something in the room with Jim that makes silence feel like a reasonable place to be. Not absence — presence.
"How did you know where to come?" I ask.
"I'd been moving toward here for a while," he says. "Not this facility specifically. This direction." He glances at my wrist. "Something pulling."
"Yeah," I say. "I know how that goes."
The corner of his mouth does something small. Not quite a smile. Acknowledgment.
"Cal was on the mountain," I say. "He was at the window when you came in."
Something moves in Jim's face.
"Did you recognize him?"
A pause. "I recognized something," he says carefully. "Not a face. Something else." He looks at his coffee. "I don't have all of my before. Some of it came back. Some of it didn't." He says itplainly, the way you say a fact you've made peace with. "The gaps don't close. They just stop being all you can see."
I think about RJ. About Gray's walls and what they were built to hold. About the specific cost of coming back from somewhere that took everything.
"Cal's good," I say. "He'll work with what you have."
Jim looks at me. "You trust him."
"Yes."
He nods. Looks back at his coffee.
"The marks," he says, after a moment. Still not looking at my wrist. "How many."
