I pick up the ticket. Hold it for a moment — the thin paper, slightly damp from where I've been gripping it, the printed destination already going abstract. I set it face-down on the plastic seat beside me.
I stand up.
I don't look at the ticket again.
The suitcase wheel catches on a seam in the tile as I turn. I tuck the notebook into my bag, the worn spiral cover settling at the top where I can feel it. I'm keeping it. For the first time in five years, I'm keeping a notebook.
The woman behind the ticket counter is helping someone else. The toddler from earlier is asleep against his father's arm, the juice box on the floor beside them. Ordinary. All of it ordinary.
I push through the door.
The heat hits first, then the light.
January in Miami and the sun is already working hard, bouncing off every pale surface. I stand on the sidewalk for a moment and let it land on my face — just that, just the warmth — before I start moving.
The city moves around me. Traffic, a woman on a bicycle, someone's music from a passing car. I roll the suitcase to the curb and pull out my phone.
The penthouse is twenty minutes by rideshare. That's where I'm going first — the pool, my pool, the place I've watched him move through the dark water at five in the morning like the only person awake in the world. If he's not there I'll try La Sirena, and if not there then I'll keep looking, because he has to be somewhere. I have nowhere else to be and all the time in the world.
I have things to say.
30 - Logan
Idon’t remember driving here.
The car is in the garage. The sun is barely above the bay and I'm on the rooftop, clothes stiff with salt I haven't washed off because somewhere between the beach and here I lost an hour. The autopilot that took me to the water eventually brought me to this water instead.
The pool is warm. Dawn light sits on its surface in long gold strips, white at the center where the sun catches it direct, gold at the edges where it spreads. Miami spreads below the rooftop edge — the bay flat and silver, the grid of lights still running from a night that doesn't know it's over. I'm sitting at the edge with my feet in the water, clothes and all, because I got this far and then simply stopped.
The warmth works up through my calves while the breeze off the bay finds the back of my neck. A soft lap of water against the pool's edge, rhythmic, indifferent. Somewhere below, early traffic.
Jimmy Polson is still in a holding room. There's a decision waiting for me. The machinery would run it clean, the same way it runs everything. But it isn't running today.
The spiral burned itself through hours ago. I didn't drown in the Atlantic. My body made that decision without asking me.
The pool ripples around my feet. This is where we held each other in the water and she saideverything is perfectand I had agreed with my whole body even while my mind refused the word.
I press my palms flat on the tile. I'm not leaving.
The elevator chimes.
I hear her before I see her — footsteps on tile, a soft drag of wheels. Then her voice, saying my name the way she says everything. Flat and certain and asking nothing.
"Logan."
I turn.
She's standing at the edge of the rooftop with a new suitcase beside her. She looks like she's been crying. She looks like she walked here from somewhere far away.
The suitcase.
She was leaving. Was at a bus station or a flight terminal or just standing at the door of this building deciding whether to come back in.
I can't move. I'm sitting at the edge of her pool in salt-stiff clothes watching her cross the rooftop toward me, and my chest is doing something I won't let happen because I know what I am now, I know what I did, and she doesn't deserve the weight of it.
She stops a few feet away. Looks down at me.
"You were leaving," I say.
