They sat across the table from each other, coffee cooling between them.Mid-morning light filled the room.She could see the scar on his left forearm where the henley sleeve had ridden up—a thin white line that ran from wrist to elbow, surgical and precise.
“Graham.”
He looked at her.
“You were in the parking lot last night.Since midnight.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not surveillance.”
“No.”He met her eyes, and she saw his guard drop.Not the containment he carried like a second skin.What was underneath it.“It’s not surveillance.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know what to call it yet.It’s not protocol.It’s not objective.Caleb would tell me it compromises the mission.”He paused.“He’d be right.”
“Does that bother you?”
“It should.”
“I didn’t ask if it should.”
He held her gaze.The room was quiet except for the refrigerator humming through its cycle.
“No,” he said.“It doesn’t bother me.”
Maren wrapped her hands around her mug.The coffee was lukewarm now.She drank it anyway.
“They’re pushing me out,” she said.“The day shift move is step two.Peg laid it out—the third move is HR and a separation agreement.They’ll frame it as voluntary.A clean reference in exchange for walking away.”
“Will you?”
“Will I what?Walk away?”
“Yes.”
She looked at him across the table, at the scar on his forearm, the lines around his eyes, and the way he sat in her space like he belonged there and didn’t belong there at the same time.
“A woman extended her arm to me last night.She let me take her blood pressure because I told her I was a nurse, not one of them, and she decided to believe me.Three hours later, she was gone.I don’t know where she is.I don’t know if she’s alive.And somewhere in that hospital, there is a record that says she was never there at all.”
She set down the mug.
“No.I’m not walking away.”
Graham looked at her for a long moment.Then he nodded—once, the way he did when he’d heard something that mattered and was making room for it.
“Okay.You’re not walking away.Then we figure out how to keep you inside that hospital without getting you killed.”
“We,” she said.
“We.”
The word sat between them.Maren reached across the table and laid her hand over his.
His fingers opened beneath hers.Then they closed—not tentatively, the way he’d reached for her on the tailgate.Deliberately.A decision, not an impulse.
Neither of them let go.
