"We do! Just along the far wall?—"
"I'll need to add a selection to the order."
He starts toward the far wall.
"Lace causes infections!" I call after him.
He pauses. Looks back over his shoulder with the expression of a man incorporating new data. "Cotton and lace, then," he says, and continues.
Finn absolutely loses it.
It's the full laugh—the bright, unrestrained, slightly too loud version that he's been deploying since the bar floor and that I'm beginning to understand is his authentic response rather than a performance of enjoying himself. He leans into the shelf next to him for structural support.
"The face you made," he manages.
"I made a completely reasonable medical point?—"
"At full volume, in a dress shop, while Declan O'Rourke was walking away."
"He was going to buy entirely wrong underwear."
"He's going to buy you underwear regardless, Lucky. That ship has sailed."
I look at the ceiling briefly. My scent is doing something—the lime zest present, the honey-vanilla warmer than it's been since I walked in, my body interpreting the afternoon's events with a reading I haven't authorized. The shop smells like pressed fabric and the faint lavender sachets the owner keeps between inventory, and underneath all of it the three scents of the packhave settled into the space and are doing what they've been doing since the hotel room: combining into something that shouldn't be as comfortable as it is.
"You're not used to it," Finn says.
His voice has dropped from the laughter—not all the way, still warm, but quieter now, directed specifically at me.
"Having men just—do things for you. Without a ledger."
I look at him.
"My ex pack had a very specific economy," I say. "Everything had a corresponding expectation. The balance was always running. If they bought something, I was already calculating what I'd owe on the other side."
"That's not how it's supposed to work."
"No," I agree. "I'm aware of that intellectually."
"But it's harder to know it the other way."
I don't say anything, because he's right and confirming it out loud feels like more vulnerability than the dress shop setting requires.
Finn reaches out.
Takes my hand—not dramatically, the way he did at the bar when he was on his knees and the whole room was watching, but simply, the way you take someone's hand when you want them to feel the contact rather than observe it. His thumb traces once across my knuckles, light and deliberate.
"Twenty days is a lot of time," he says. "You don't have to figure out how to receive things gracefully by tomorrow. But our intention—" He pauses, something shifting in his expression toward the sincere register he reaches for when the banter drops away. "Our intention is that for whatever time we have here, you feel safe. Properly rested. Taken care of in the way you should have been for a long time."
I swallow.
The lump in my throat is the specific kind that arrives when kindness is extended in a context where you haven't had it in long enough that your body treats it like a foreign substance—something it has to identify before it can process. I've been running on the adrenaline of crisis management for so many consecutive months that the sudden absence of it, combined with a dress that moves when I do and three men in a shop making unhurried decisions about what I need, has done something to my operational composure.
"Okay," I say.
It's only one word. It's the only one available.
Finn squeezes my hand once and releases it.
