"You don't know me," I say, but the edge is gone from the words.
"I know what I see."
"And what's that?"
He holds my gaze. The lamp flickers in the wind, shadows jumping, and his face is half gold, half dark. "Someone who came to a retreat to find something she thinks she lost. Except it's not lost. It's just scared."
"Are you quoting my own scene back at me?"
"Paraphrasing."
I laugh again—quieter this time, a sound that feels dangerously close to tenderness. The wind slams against the building, and the lights flicker once more, and this time I don't grab the mattress. My fingers find the pillow wall instead, testing it, and something in my ribs unclenches—a held breath released, a wall I didn't know I was holding finally giving way.
"Tell me something else," I say. "Something that's not about fear or quiet or exes."
Tucker settles back against the headboard, and the movement shifts the mattress, shifts the air, shifts everything by degrees. "What do you want to know?"
"Why Salt and Steel? Why security?"
"Calder—my boss—he served with me. Built the company, offered me a spot when I got out. Said it would be a bridge."
"A bridge to what?"
"That's the question." He picks up the Ishiguro, turns it over in his hands without opening it. "On the teams, you don't think about what comes after. There is no after. There's the mission, and then there's the next mission. When it stops—when you're the one who stopped it—you realize you don't have a single skill that translates to anything civilians actually need."
"That's not true."
"It feels true."
"Tucker, you carried my suitcase, evacuated six people through a hurricane, and just told me my writing isn't predictable with more conviction than my agent has managed in a year. Those are transferable skills."
The corner of his mouth lifts. "You should write that up for my résumé."
We talk until the conversation turns to murmurs, and the murmurs turn to half-sentences, and the half-sentences dissolve into the white noise of the storm. At some point the laptop slides off my legs, and Tucker reaches across the pillow wall to catch it before it falls.
His hand brushes my knee. Brief, accidental, electric. We both freeze, and then he sets the laptop on the nightstand with careful precision.
"Goodnight, Kassidy."
"Goodnight, Tucker."
The lamp goes off. The darkness is total except for the faint glow of his phone charging on the floor. The storm rages, but the room feels sealed—a pocket of warmth in the chaos.
Sleep comes slowly, in fragments, between gusts of wind and the creak of the building. Sometime in the night, the pillow wall collapses. Neither of us rebuilds it.
When I finally drift off, the last thing I register is the sound of his breathing—slow, steady, an anchor in the noise—and the realization that for the first time in months, the blank page in my head doesn't feel empty. It feels like it's waiting.
Three feet away, Tucker's breathing has gone deep and even. The Ishiguro sits on his chest, open, spine cracked.
My laptop is dark. My resolve is in worse shape.
Chapter 6
Tucker
She talks in her sleep.
Not coherent sentences—fragments. Character names, plot points, what sounds like an argument with someone named Ryan. Her brow furrows, and her lips move, and at one point she murmurs, "That's not how he'd say it," with such conviction that I almost answer.
