What comes out of me is not words. It's a gasp that breaks in the middle. And then I'm crying — not the clean kind, not tears sliding quietly down my cheeks. I'm shaking. My breath is coming in ragged pieces. The sound that keeps escaping me is wrecked and ugly and I can't stop it.
He moves without hesitation, around the booth, and then his arms are around me and my face is against his chest and I'm sobbing into the fabric of his jacket and I can't stop. I try to stop. I can't.
My mother.
She had soft hands. Even at the end, even when everything else was going, her hands stayed soft. I held them and held them. I learned how to hold them safely — how to lift her wrist without hurting her, how to adjust the IV line, how to rub warmth into her fingers when she couldn't stop shivering. I knew her hands better than my own.
Her last breath. I was right there. I heard it — the sound of a body finally stopping. And I sat in that chair and held her hand and waited.
The grief didn't come.
I had prepared so carefully. I'd read about it, understood the stages, believed I was ready. I thought I knew what it would feel like.
Nothing came. Just quiet. And then I stood up, and I walked out, and I got on a bus, and I started moving.
"My mother." The words come out broken between the sobs. I'm gripping his jacket with both fists and I can't let go.
His hand is at the back of my head. He doesn't sayit's okay.He doesn't sayI'm sorry.He presses his palm against my hair and holds me and he doesn't move.
At some point, very quietly, he says my name — justWren— and I feel it in my sternum.
She'll never meet him.
That's the thought that comes from nowhere and hits harder than the first wave — fresh grief breaking through just when the first one was beginning to crest. My mother, who used to ask me about boys with this particular hopefulness on her face, teasing and desperately curious — she'll never know that I found this. She'll never know I woke up. She'll never sit in a kitchen somewhere and hear about the man who bought me a penthouse and couldn't leave a strip club and asked, quietly, if I was okay.
I'm not alone. That's what cracks me open further — the strangeness of it, after so long. He's here and he's holding me and he doesn't understand what's happening and he's not leaving. I give him fragments between sobs because that's all I have:alone, years, she's gone, I couldn't cry.He holds each fragment without trying to arrange them into sense.
"She would have loved you," I manage, between breaths. Not to him, exactly. To the air, to her, to the five years I spent feeling nothing. "Or hated you."
I want to laugh at that, but instead I’m sobbing even harder.
He holds me through the wave. And the next one. His hand in my hair, steady. Not leaving.
The phone rings.
Not buzzes — rings. The sound cuts through the booth and he tenses against me, one instant of every muscle going tight, and I already know. He was already borrowed time. This is the debt called in.
I pull back. Wipe my face with the back of my hand, which helps exactly nothing. My eyes are swollen. I can feel the heat in my cheeks.
He's looking at the screen. He answers and I watch his face do what it does when the war calls him back — the shift is complete and immediate, the soft thing receding, the fixer surfacing.
"How many," he says.
A pause. He's looking at the exit.
"I'm leaving now."
He ends the call. He looks at me.
I'm already gathering myself — sitting up straight, taking a breath that shakes only a little. "Go," I say. "You have to."
"Wren—"
"Logan." I meet his eyes. "Go."
He reaches for my face. Both hands, his palms against my cheeks, tilting my head. He looks at me — tear-streaked, wrecked. He looks at all of it and doesn't flinch.
"I'll come back," he says. A promise, not a reassurance. The difference is everything.
