Below us, another vehicle door shut.
I put on the shirt.
The act did not make me Mercer. It made me dressed.
Ten minutes later, I walked Juliette through the side corridor toward the staging courtyard, past the closed office door, the stacked linen carts, and the service corridor where staff moved quietly around one another with the careful speed of people who had learned that panic wasted oxygen.
The lodge smelled of coffee, damp canvas, and floor polish applied too early by someone trying to scrub yesterday out of the boards. Staff moved through the service corridor with quiet purpose, one carrying duffel bags, another balancing a tray of travel mugs, all of them speaking in low voices because volume made fear contagious.
Sarah stood beside the lead vehicle with a clipboard, her hair twisted back, her face arranged into the sort of neutrality that guaranteed she had missed nothing.
Naomi sat inside the vehicle already, sunglasses on despite the weak light. Victor stood near the steps, muttering into his phone about “assurances.” His cufflinks had survived the security breach. Fucking tragic.
Juliette’s suitcase sat in the rear compartment beneath two other bags. On top of her tote,The Crimson Crownrested spine-up, cracked and absurd and somehow more intimate than anything else she owned.
I checked the rear latch myself. Then the tires. Then the driver’s radio. Then the escort position at the gate.
Juliette watched me from beside the open door.
“You know,” she said, “some people say goodbye with words.”
“Some people don’t inspect vehicles properly.”
“That will be beautiful on a throw pillow.”
I looked at her then.
The courtyard noise thinned. Staff. Engines. Birds starting up in the fever trees beyond the lodge. Her face held steady, but her mouth had gone pale at the edges.
“Text me when you reach the airstrip,” I said.
“I will.”
“And Johannesburg.”
“Yes.”
“And when—”
“Nick.”
I stopped.
Her eyes held mine. “Don't turn concern into command because it feels safer.”
Behind my ribs, something shifted against bone.
Naomi’s sunglasses angled toward us. Sarah became intensely interested in the clipboard. The driver stared straight ahead with the survival instinct of a married man.
I stepped closer to the open door. Not enough to touch her. Enough that her next breath crossed the front of my shirt.
“I’ll stop pretending I’m glad you’re leaving,” I said.
Juliette’s breath caught. Once.
Then she climbed into the vehicle.
I shut the door myself.
