She's carrying a tablet and a coffee that smells like something with a name I couldn't pronounce — something Kari would try, because Kari tries everything, because she's the kind of person who orders the strangest thing on the menu just to see what happens.
My jaw tightens again. Everything circles back.
Evie's heels click twice on the concrete before she stops, blocking my path with the casual precision of someone who spent over a decade at Interpol cornering people who didn't want to be cornered.
"Cade."
"March."
She looks at me the way she looks at a spreadsheet that doesn't balance. "Are you an idiot?"
"Depends on the context."
"The context is obvious." She steps aside. Keeps walking. Doesn't look back.
I stand in the corridor for longer than I'd admit to anyone.
Two people in the same building — one who's known me for years, one who barely tolerates me on a good day — both arriving at the same conclusion. The one I've been circling for three days like it's a suspect I can't approach.
The ops floor door opens behind me. Someone's phone rings. The sound is thin, efficient — nothing like the creak of a Victorian settling into its own bones.
I take the elevator down. Kari would've talked to the speaker. Told it to play something with a backbone.
The lobby is glass. The street beyond it is bright. I walk through both without cataloging the exits.
That's a first.
My apartment is twelve minutes from The Glasshouse. I've timed it — morning, evening, middle of the night. Twelve minutes in every condition.
The door locks behind me. Deadbolt, chain, habit. The air smells like nothing. Not bad, not stale — just absence. No coconut. No sawdust. No banana bread cooling on a counter that's seen better decades.
The kitchen is clean because I never use it. The bed is made because I made it before I left for the Foxglove, and no one has touched it since. White sheets, square corners, military tight. No yellow flowers. No dip in the mattress where someone curls into me at three in the morning.
Everything is exactly where it should be.
My coffee maker doesn't have a name. Nobody's talking to the pipes. The silence doesn't have layers — no settling Victorianbones, no radiator that groans when the temperature drops, no front porch floorboards announcing visitors before they knock.
Just silence. The flat, empty kind.
I sit on the couch. Elbows on knees, hands laced behind my neck. The bookshelf holds operational manuals, a few histories, nothing with a cracked spine from being read on a back porch like contraband.
Three days ago, this was enough. I could sit in this room and call it order. Call it discipline. Call it the shape a life takes when you build it for one purpose — staying alive, keeping others alive, never needing more than what fits in a bag you can carry out the door.
It's the opposite of everything I want.
The thought arrives without permission. My body knew before my brain caught up — the hitch in my breathing when she walked into a room, the way my hand found the small of her back without a tactical reason, the way I stopped cataloging exits when she was talking because her voice was more interesting than every window and door combined.
The safest I've ever been was in a crumbling B&B with seven entry points and a pillow wall that lasted only a few nights.
My father taught me that love is a weapon. That the people closest to you can cut deepest because they know where the soft spots are. He was right about that part. Kari knows where every soft spot is — the magnet story, the scar, the four-second read at the door, the reason I enlisted, the reason I don't sleep.
She knows all of it.
She hasn't used any of it.
The apartment ticks around me. Efficient. Controlled.
No yellow bedspread. No cheerful flowers. No woman in a stolen henley calling a power sander by her first name. No one asking if I'm okay — about me, not the case.
