"Seven-fifteen."
She processes this. "I need to—"
"Eat first."
"Ross."
"Celeste." I don't raise my voice. "Eat."
She eats. I sit across from her and drink the coffee she made sometime in the night, now hours old. Color comes back into her face by degrees.
"I found something," she says between bites. "Up near the creek. There's a ridge that would work as a relay point for the whole northern part of the valley. If the coverage math holds up it changes the entire picture of what's possible up here." She's waking up fully now, animation coming back. "I've been trying to model it but I need more field data and I was going to go up there today."
"On a mountain road with no sleep."
She opens her mouth, then sets the fork down. Looks at the notes spread across her desk — months of work, all of it hers, no one else's fingerprints on any of it. I understand that this matters to her in a way that goes beyond professional pride. She built this from nothing, after someone took everything. Of course she's driving herself past the edge of reasonable.
"Strength isn't doing it all alone," I hear myself say. "I learned that on the rigs. You can push through a lot of things. You can't push through a car accident on a logging road."
She's quiet.
"Lie down," I say. "A few hours. I'll be here."
She looks like she's going to argue. Then, she shrugs.
She goes to the couch. I hear her kick off her shoes. Then quiet.
I pull a chair to her desk and look at what's spread across it. Field notes, speed test data, hand-drawn topography sketches. The map on the wall with its colored pins — yellow for dead zones, blue for marginal, green for workable signal. Mostly yellow.
I find a legal pad and leave her a note about three things I noticed in her northern ridge calculations that might affect the relay math. I don't touch her notes. I don't reorganize anything. I just leave the note where she'll see it.
Then I start on the wiring.
I'm pulling cable through the living room wall when I hear her moving about an hour and a half later. She comes to the doorway, hair down now, looking like a person who's remembered what sleep is for.
"You left notes," she says. She reads them. I keep working. After a minute she comes and stands in the doorway.
"The relay height calculation. You're right, I was working from the wrong contour line." She's thinking aloud. "That actually makes the northern coverage better, not worse."
"Okay."
She looks at me. "How did you catch that?"
"Spent a lot of years looking at topography maps on the rigs. Trying to figure out signal propagation in rough terrain." I feed the cable through to the next junction. "Different context. Same geometry."
She's quiet for a moment. Then she crosses the room and crouches down to where I'm working, close enough that I can smell her shampoo.
"I don't know how to let people help," she says. "I'm aware that this is a problem."
"I know." I turn to look at her. We're very close — closer than the radiator gap, close enough that I can see the particular darkof her eyes, and I'm thinking about the kitchen three nights ago, my thumb on her cheekbone, the way she went completely still. "I'm not great at it either."
The kiss is hers — she starts it, both hands on my face, and it's not tentative. I drop the cable pull. My hands go to her waist and she makes a sound against my mouth that I feel more than hear, and I pull her in and she comes willingly and the living room floor is not a comfortable place to kneel but I am not thinking about that.
When she pulls back we're both very still. She looks at me for a long moment. Then she leans in and kisses me again, slower this time, less urgency and more intention, and I bring one hand up to her jaw and she makes a sound against my mouth that does something specific to my ability to think clearly.
"Your relay calculation," I say, when we break apart. "You should go up to Harrow Creek tomorrow. I'll drive."
She blinks. "You'll drive."
