You didn’t do anything wrong. Elio leaned forward. He’s been like this the entire month. Worse, actually.
Keane sat beside me, close enough that our knees touched. I didn’t move. That one point of contact felt like proof someone was still here.
He’s not thinking clearly, Keane said. Not about anything.
He hasn’t been, Elio added. All month, it’s like… like he was trying to burn his way through the guilt. Or through missing you. Or both.
A knot formed in my stomach. And now I’m here, and he runs. My voice came out small. So what does that mean?
Neither of them answered right away.
Elio glanced at me before looking away. It means he’s scared. That’s not the same thing as gone.
I wasn’t sure I believed that. But I wanted to. Of what? Me?
Of wanting you, Keane said softly. His hand found mine in my lap. Of needing something he can’t control. Of being vulnerable with someone who might not want him back the same way.
But I do want him. The words slipped out before I could stop them. I just don’t know how to want all three of you without it being… too much. Without being selfish or greedy or…
Elio leaned forward. He’ll come around. He has to.
Does he? I asked.
Neither of them answered. Because they didn’t know either.
I missed you, I whispered. Both of you. This whole month.
We missed you too. All of us, Elio said, his smile genuine. He shrugged one shoulder toward the door. Even if one of us is spectacularly bad at showing it.
My stomach growled, loud and traitorous in the quiet room.
Elio’s grin widened. Right. Food. Let me see if the kitchen sent anything up.
I DIDN’T SLEEP. NOT REALLY.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Cyrus’s face—that raw pained look right before he slammed his walls back up and fled. I kept replaying it, trying to catch the moment it turned. Trying to figure out what I’d done wrong.
As if I hadn’t already spent a month pulling apart every word between us. As if obsession could pass for clarity.
By two in the morning I gave up on sleep entirely.
The common room was quiet. The fire had burned down to coals. Keane’s research was still spread across the table—maps and folders and Levon’s records, exactly where he’d left them before he’d gone to bed. Weeks of work laid out in his careful handwriting, connections I couldn’t quite follow but trusted he could.
My bag sat on the floor beside the couch, still half-unpacked.
I pulled out my father’s notebook now.
When I grabbed it from the compartment in Alstone’s lab, I’d called it his journal. In the chaos of the rescue—alarms going off, Cyrus pulling me toward the portal—I’d seen the handwriting on the cover and I’d thought: This is it. This is him. I’d shoved it into my bag without looking closely.
But it wasn’t a journal. Not a personal note from the man I never knew.
Instead it was research documentation, organized and cross-referenced, the handwriting precise and impersonal in the way of someone writing for an audience of future strangers. He had detailed evidence of corruption at wellspring sites, council meeting records, proof of the manufactured war, documented in neat columns with citations.
He’d hidden it all because it mattered.
Nothing of him in it at all.
I already knew what that felt like, almost. The diary the wellspring had sent me had been encrypted—a cipher I hadn’t been able to crack before the council burned it. I’d saved a few pages, fragments I still carried, and I’d spent months telling myself that if I could just decode them I’d finally hear his voice. Instead I’d gotten administrative record-keeping in his handwriting. Clean and careful and completely impersonal, written for whoever came after him rather than for me.
