He's right, and I hate it. Something shifted overnight—not just the story but the weight of it, the suffocating pressure that had calcified around my chest like a cage. It's still there, but looser. Breathable.
"Want to explore?" Tucker asks.
"Explore what? We're in a twenty-room inn surrounded by flood water."
"The inn has a library. Saw it on the first-floor plan when we did the security sweep."
"You memorized the floor plan?"
"Standard operating procedure."
Of course it is.
The library is a small room on the ground floor, tucked behind the lobby—all dark wood shelves, cracked leather armchairs, and that smell: old paper, leather bindings, dust, time. It makes something in me unclench. It's deserted. The other evacuees are in their rooms or clustered in the lobby watching weather updates on someone's laptop.
"Oh," I breathe, running my fingers along the spines. The collection is eclectic—paperback thrillers mixed with literary classics, romance novels with cracked spines, a whole shelf of local history. "This is perfect."
"Thought you'd like it."
"You thought I'd like it?"
"You're a writer. Writers like books. It wasn't a complex deduction."
But it was. It was a small, specific kindness—remembering that I write, intuiting that a room full of books would feel like a sanctuary, bringing me here instead of suggesting the lobby or the conference room. It was thoughtful, and thoughtful is more dangerous than attractive.
I pull a battered Scrabble box from a shelf near the window. "Want to play?"
"I should warn you," Tucker says, taking the opposite armchair. "My sister is a speech pathologist. Family game nights were a bloodbath."
"I should warn you. I'm a novelist. Words are literally my profession."
"Then this should be interesting."
The first round is a feeling-out process. He plays solid, strategic words—QUARTZ on a triple letter, JINXED across the center. Respectable. But he's holding back, I can tell. Testing the waters.
My opening salvo: OBSIDIAN, using all seven tiles. Fifty-point bonus.
His eyebrows rise. "Showing off?"
"Establishing dominance."
"In Scrabble."
"In all things."
He laughs—a real one, full and warm—and something in the room shifts. The formality that's been hovering between us since day one starts to dissolve. We're not security and guest anymore. We're two competitive people hunched over a board game, and the stakes feel simultaneously trivial and enormous.
The game escalates. He plays ZEALOT on a double word score. I counter with EPIPHANY, hooking the Y onto his Z for maximum damage. He whistles through his teeth.
"Where'd you learn to play like this?"
"My mom. She's a retired English teacher. Scrabble was our version of combat training."
"Ah. So this is genetic."
"This is a lifetime of training for exactly this moment."
He plays VORTEX. I play EUPHORIA. He narrows his eyes at the board, recalculating.
