I need to organize my thoughts. Not write a new document to send, but create a framework for how I’ll speak when they ask their questions. Talking points. The narrative arc they need to hear.
For a moment, everything inside me vibrates—the romance, the research, the fear, the longing, the fight—all competing for space in my head.
Then I hear Fortuna’s voice again, light as a fingertip on the inside of my skull: You can hold both.
“Yes,” I whisper. “I can.”
I open a clean document—not for submission, just for clarity. At the top, I type:Interview Prep: Key Points for the Office of Research Integrity
Underneath, I begin organizing the framework I’ll need when I’m sitting in front of them:
• Pattern of appropriation over time
• Power dynamics: senior researcher vs. early-career researcher
• Autistic communication style misread as uncertainty
• Refusal to disappear ≠ aggression — it is integrity
My fingers move faster. Steady. Sure.
I think of a panel of strangers deciding whether my truth is palatable enough to fit their rubric.Then there’s Flavius yesterday—dangerous, brilliant, controlled. Flavius last night—shaking, vulnerable, choosing to stay. Flavius this morning—letting me love him without flinching.
My body logs that memory as data: Safe. Held. Chosen.
“I can do this,” I say aloud, surprised by how right it sounds.
Not bravado. Not hope. Fact.
Outside, a child screams with delight as someone demonstrates a foam-sword “fatal blow.” A horse snorts. Diana yells something about helmets.
The sanctuary goes on.
So do I.
The wheel is still turning—slow, rusty, bureaucratic—but now there’s momentum. And for the first time, the turning doesn’t scare me.
Because I’m not disappearing.
Not from this fight. Not from this life. And definitely not fromhim.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sophia
By late afternoon on Thursday, I’ve been staring at my laptop for so many hours that the words have started to blur together.
Interview prep. Argument frameworks. Potential questions and my answers to them. The same bullet points I’ve reorganized seventeen different ways, as if the perfect structure will make the committee’s decision for them.
My shoulders are somewhere up near my ears, tension knotted so deep I can feel it in my jaw.
I need air. I need to move—anything to stop thinking in circles.
Only when I open the door do I realize how tightly I’m holding my shoulders—and see him waiting on the bench outside my cabin.
Flavius rises the moment he sees me, as though something wired into him refuses to let me face anything alone. His hair is damp from a shower; his T-shirt is clean. The sight hits me with a strange, steady warmth.
“Long day?” he asks quietly.
