I sat with it and tried to reconstruct what I could of my Kindt model from memory, but my brain kept drifting to the sound of Maude’s voice and the locked doors and the welts on his forearm. By the time Travis came back upstairs, the light through the kitchen windows had gone amber, and I’d written the same paragraph three times.
He made pasta without commentary. We ate at the table and talked about encryption protocols, workstation access, and safe topics that kept us on solid ground and away from the quiet underneath.
But the quiet was there. Before yesterday, the last time I’d been this close to Travis for more than an hour, Naomi had been alive. She’d been the center of every room, the reason he was there, the reason I stayed on the edges and kept my face composed and told myself that wanting him was a sickness I’d eventually recover from.
Three years later, the sickness was exactly where I’d left it. Untreated. Patient. Waiting for proximity to make it flare.
He cleared the plates. I washed them, because sitting still while someone cleaned up after me wasn’t something I was capable of. We moved around the kitchen without speaking, and once, reaching for the dish towel at the same time, our hands touched.
Brief. Accidental.
He pulled his hand back first. Not fast. Just first. And he didn’t look at me when he did it.
“I’ll have your workstation set up by morning,” he said. “Get some sleep.”
“Travis.”
He stopped in the doorway.
“Thank you. For coming to get me. For saving my life. For this. For all of it.”
He stood there with his hand on the frame, and I could see the tension running through him—the rigid line of his shoulders, the careful way he held his weight off his left side. A man who’d driven six hundred miles in a day through a condition that made his body rebel against him, because I was in danger.
“Get some sleep, Sera.”
He left. The heavy door at the end of the hall opened and closed, and he was gone into the parts of the house I wasn’t allowed to see.
I went to the guest room. Sat on the edge of the bed. Plain comforter. Empty nightstand. Blinds drawn.
Last night I’d been a trespasser. Tonight I lived here. The distinction should have felt like progress, but it didn’t. It felt like standing on a ledge I’d walked to voluntarily, looking down at a drop I’d known was there all along.
I was in love with Travis Hale. I had been in love with him since a Sunday barbecue four years ago when he’d stood beside me in my parents’ kitchen and looked at me like I was a person worth seeing. He’d belonged to my sister then. He belonged to her memory now.
I was just lying in his guest room in his underground compound in Montana, and the guilt of wanting him was the same guilt it had always been, just closer.
I pressed my palms flat against the mattress. Made myself breathe. In through my nose, out through pursed lips, the way I’d managed my lungs my whole life.
Some things, I was learning, couldn’t be managed.
