Then she rises on her toes and kisses me, slow and sure, and the afternoon stretches out in front of us like a gift we almost didn't get to open.
Later that night, Lily is asleep. The house is quiet. The fire has burned down to embers, casting the bedroom in a low amber glow.
Julianna lies beside me, her head on my chest, her hand tracing patterns on my ribs.
"Do you ever think about it?" Her fingers trace a slow, absent path over my chest. "The server room."
"Every day."
I don't lie to her. The server room lives in me the way certain missions do—a layer that doesn't fade. The moment the halon dumped. The crack of her mask. The pressure in my lungs when I gave her my mask. The darkness crawling in from the edges.
Her hands on my chest, pressing, counting, refusing to let me go. Waking up, seeing her unconscious across my body. Not breathing. Bringing her back with that stupid song in my head.
"I dream about it sometimes." She shifts slightly, looking up at me in the low light. "Not the dying part. The waking-up part. Opening my eyes, and you were there. Holding me."
My arm tightens around her.
"I'm not going anywhere."
"I know." She lifts her head. Looks at me in the low light. "Neither am I."
The weight of the statement settles. She means the trial. The pregnancy. The cabin. The life we're building in the narrow space between what she did and what she's becoming.
I pull her up, closer, until her mouth is over mine. She tastes like the tea she drank after dinner. Like the toothpaste she uses. Like the future I never let myself imagine.
"Horizontal afternoon." Her lips brush mine, warm and teasing. "Technically, it's evening now."
"I'll make an exception."
She laughs, low and warm, and then her hands are in my hair. My hands are under her shirt.
The math stops being a metaphor when two become one.
There is only this.
Us.
Later
She sleeps.I don't.
Old habit. Someone has to stay awake.
But I stay awake differently now. Not scanning for threats. Not calculating exit strategies. Just watching her breathe. The rise and fall of her chest. The way her hand curls near her face. The slight smile she doesn't know she makes in her sleep.
In three days, we'll be in a courtroom. In three days, twelve strangers will decide whether the woman in my bed walks free or disappears into a system that doesn't care about defection, bullets taken, or hearts restarted.
I can't control it. I've tried.
Ghost has tried.
Cassie, Talia, and the entire legal apparatus of Guardian HRS have tried. At the end of the day, it comes down to twelve people and whatever they see when they look at Julianna.
I know what I see.
The woman who taught my daughter to love math through a locked door when she hadn't earned the right to speak her name.
The woman who stood between my child and a bullet.
