I’m sorry, I think into the quiet. To whom, I’m not entirely sure.
Closing her door quietly, I return to the living room.
Sitting on the edge of the couch in the dark where she’d been sleeping, both hands pressed against my knees, I look at the blank television screen and try to put back whatever just shifted.
But I can’t.
Memphis puts his head in my lap, my hand rests on him, and we sit there in the quiet of the house for a long time.
Not now, thinking into the dark.There’s Mexico. There’s the mission. There’s Quill’s one week. Everything else waits.
***
In the morning, she makes breakfast.
Coming back from feeding Memphis, I find Sophia at the stove in her dressing gown, hair still loose from sleep, moving around the kitchen with the ease of someone who has stopped counting the days she’s been here and started just being here instead.
Coffee is already poured, and the mug is sitting exactly where it always does.
She slides the plate across the island when sitting down, eggs the way I like them, which she’d figured out without being told somewhere around the second week, and goes back to her own without making anything of it.
“Sleep well?”
She looks up. “I don’t remember falling asleep, actually.”
“You were out before the credits.”
She smiles, slightly embarrassed, slightly not. “The couch is comfortable.”
Her eyes drop to the plate.
“Yeah.”
Not telling her she hadn’t woken up on the couch.
Picking up the fork, I eat the eggs, drink the coffee, and listen to Sophia move around the kitchen in the morning quiet and letting myself have it, the flowers on the island, the painting on the wall, the coffee already waiting, this woman in her dressing gown making breakfast on a Sunday morning like it is simply what happens here now.
Not now.
There’s Mexico. There’s the mission. There’s Quill’s one week. Everything else can wait.
For now, I eat the eggs and say nothing at all.
Chapter Twenty-Four
TATE
It’s Saturday, and being inside feels wrong. Sophia is at the island with her laptop, not caring that it is the weekend, and the decision is made before I’ve fully thought it through.
“Get dressed.”
She looks up from her screen. “Excuse me?”
“We’re going out.”
She looks at me for a moment, that assessing look she has, the one that decides things before she says anything out loud. “Where?” she asks.
“You’ll see.”
