She shrugged.
“Maybe.”
She didn’t sound convinced.
“So what did you do?” I asked.
She tucked herself back against me, her voice dropping. “I focused on Lily. That’s all there needed to be. She kept me grounded.”
I nodded.
“I worked,” she added. “Bookkeeping from home, mostly. Numbers made sense. They didn’t shift on you. I also waited tables at a diner at night, right up until Fiona started renting the room.”
For a second, everything was almost normal. Two people talking in the dark, learning about each other. No dead things wandering through the streets outside.
I nudged gently. “What about before all that?”
That drew something different from her, softer. A small, private smile ghosted across her lips, as if it belonged to someone she used to be.
“I hiked,” she said. “A lot.”
I blinked down at her.
“Hiked?”
“Yeah.” Warmth crept into her voice for the first time all night. “My dad—he worked as an archaeologist, always out somewhere. Dig sites, old ruins, tunnels nobody had walked through in centuries.”
“Explains a lot,” I muttered.
She elbowed me lightly in the ribs.
“Hey.”
I smirked.
“Continue.”
She rolled her eyes but kept going, and I watched her face change as she talked. The tension around her mouth eased. Her shoulders dropped. She looked younger.
“He used to take me with him whenever he could. We’d explore all kinds of places—old tunnels, abandoned structures, anything historical he could get access to. Sometimes legal. Sometimes…” she trailed off with a guilty half-smile.
“Ah, a little criminal,” I joked.
“Sometimes not,” she confirmed, her voice lighter, like those memories lived somewhere the world hadn’t touched yet.
“I loved it,” she said quietly. “Getting lost in places most people never saw. Standing where someone stood five hundred years ago and just… breathing the same air.”
I sat with that for a second.
“Sounds like you had a good dad.”
Her smile softened. Something fragile crossed her face and disappeared.
“I did. He died before Lily, which makes me sad and relieved. He would have been devastated by what John did to me… to us.”
Another pause.
I nudged again, lighter this time.
