"New tech miscalculated a charge weight on a controlled det. Overpressure wave came in hot." He drinks again. "Nobody died, so that counts as a win in my line of work."
The joke lands a beat late, the timing fractionally off, and the gap is where I find what he's actually saying.
"And after the win?"
"Spent an hour rechecking every calculation he's run for the past three weeks. That's apparently what my brain wants to do with its time."
"Hypervigilance."
"Thoroughness."
"Those aren't the same thing."
"Tonight they are." He passes the bottle back, and when I take it, my fingers brush his. Neither of us acknowledges it. "You're drinking my bourbon and diagnosing me. That feels like a boundary violation."
"You don't have boundaries. You have perimeters. I've been inside yours for a week."
His mouth twitches. It's the closest thing to a real smile I've seen tonight, gone before it settles.
The wind picks up off the bay, pushing salt air across the narrow platform, and I pull my sleeves over my hands. Griff notices.
"Inside," he says.
We end up on the floor of the living space, backs against the couch, the bottle between us. The loft is dark, just the screensaver glow from my monitors and the silver that the water throws through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and his shoulder is close enough that I can feel heat coming off it without making contact.
The silence settles comfortably, and I let it sit before I say the name I've been carrying since Holden mentioned it a few days ago.
"Wade."
His hand stills on the bottle. He flinches, a small controlled motion suppressed before it reaches his face, but I'm close enough to see the muscles in his forearm lock.
"You've been doing homework." His tone is light, deflective, the drawl thickening how it does when he's putting distance between himself and a word.
"Holden mentioned him. Thatcher mentioned him. You haven't. Which tells me enough."
"Tells you I mind my own business. You should try it sometime." He picks at the label on the bottle, thumbnail working the edge of the paper. "Wade was Holden's. His swim buddy, his brother. I was there when it happened. That's all."
"That's all."
"Training dive. Equipment failure. Holden searched for forty-seven minutes before the recovery team called it." He delivers this how he delivers bomb assessments: flat, precise,clinical. The steadiness itself is the tell. "I'm the one who pulled Holden out of the water."
He stops. The label is shredding under his thumbnail.
"You watch someone you love lose the person they love most," he says, quieter. "It teaches you things about attachment you don't unlearn."
"And that's when you decided to keep everything casual."
"That's when I confirmed what I already knew." The words come out reluctant, catching on things they don't want to leave behind. "My parents split when I was twelve. Old man ran cattle outside Kerrville. Mom was a music teacher from Austin who thought ranch life would be romantic." He turns the bottle in his hands. "Turns out romantic has a shelf life."
"What happened?"
"What always happens. She loved him, he loved her, and they spent a year tearing each other apart across a kitchen table until she drove her car down a dirt road and didn't look back." He flicks the shredded label off his fingers. "And he went inside and made dinner like it was any other Tuesday. That was the whole lesson, right there. Staying is what breaks you. Leaving is just geography."
The drawl has gone flat. The humor is absent. The man sitting next to me on this floor is not the man who calls me ma'am over tactical channels and hides bourbon behind protein powder. This is the load-bearing structure underneath, and it's built on the conviction that everyone who stays will eventually drive down a dirt road.
"My brother said something similar." He just handed me a thing that cost him, and sitting here holding it without offering anything back would make me the kind of person my mother raised. "When I left for university. He said the Bradshaws don't run, we strategize. As though leaving a family that treated my intelligence like a commodity constituted a failure of nerverather than self-preservation." I take the bottle from him. The whiskey is smooth and a little mean, exactly how good bourbon should be. "My mother leveraged it at dinner parties. My father brokered it into professional connections. My brother resented it, wanted it for himself. Nobody asked what I wanted to do with it. The assumption was that it belonged to the family first and to me as an afterthought."
"So you took it and left."
