"Mila—"
"I'm okay. I'm somewhere safe. I'll explain properly soon, but I needed you to know I'm not in a ditch somewhere."
"You'd better come see me."
"I will. Tonight, if I can."
"The shift—take the night. I'll manage."
"Danny—"
"Take the night, Mila." Firm, warm, the specific combination that is Danny at his most parental, which he would absolutely deny. "You can owe me a coffee."
He hangs up before we can argue.
The room has the particular quality of a space being occupied by people who are not yet doing anything productive but are preparing to—the energy of a morning that hasn't fully established itself, the day holding its shape while the people in it find their footing. Finn has reclaimed his position on the bed, sitting up now with his hair doing things that require absolutely no effort to look good, which is deeply unfair. Rowan has not moved.
I hand Declan his phone back.
He takes it, and for a moment we're both just—sitting in the same bed in a hotel room in Oakridge Hollow at three in the afternoon, the storm finally quieted outside from what I can tell through the thin lines at the curtain's edge, ten hours of sleep between me and the worst night my life has produced in recent memory.
He's real.
That's the thing I keep landing on. After twenty-four hours of telling myself to stop thinking about a man whose name I didn't have and whose face I'd never properly seen, the actual person is sitting eighteen inches away from me, and the scent is exactly what I remembered, and the grey-green eyes are doing the same thing they did in the courtyard—reading, patient, giving me whatever time I need to locate the next sentence.
I danced with this man.
"You're the one from the masquerade," I say.
"Yes."
"And Rowan found me on the road last night."
"Yes."
"And Finn—" I look at Finn, who is watching this exchange with the expression of someone at a very good show, "—was at Clancy's."
"Also, yes," Finn confirms.
I look at the ceiling for a moment, taking stock of the geometry of the last twenty-four hours. Three men. Three separate encounters—a ball, a bar, a road in the rain—that I had no idea were connected until this moment in a hotel bed in the mid-afternoon with all three of them present and accounted for in approximately six square feet of shared space.
"The universe," I say, to nobody specific, "has a very particular sense of humor."
"That's one word for it," Finn says.
Declan says nothing, which I am starting to understand is his version of agreeing with something.
Rowan, without opening his eyes, says: "Coffee."
Finn points at him.
"See? That's the first word he's voluntarily said in eight hours. This is progress."
"It's a request," Rowan says. "Not progress."
"To me, it's progress."
"Get the coffee, Finn."
