Elias is breathing softly beside me, and I find myself watching him with fascination.
Then his eyes open.
Not gradually. Not the slow blink of someone surfacing reluctantly. Just closed, then open, and immediately present. His gaze finds the ceiling first, then shifts to me, and whatever he sees on my face makes his expression soften.
“You slept,” he says. His voice carries the roughness of early morning, lower than usual.
“Yeah,” I say.
He holds my eyes for a moment, seeming to gauge my mood. Then, satisfied: “Good.”
He doesn’t rush to get up or reach for his phone. He stays where he is while the room settles around us, and I appreciate that he doesn’t immediately make the morning functional. There’s something about the unhurried quality of those few minutes—the soft gold light, the layered warmth, his steady breathing—that I want to hold onto a little longer.
“I keep expecting this to feel strange,” I say, not quite meaning to say it out loud.
He tilts his head. “Does it?”
I think about it. “No.”
The corner of his mouth moves. It’s small enough that someone else might miss it. “Then stop expecting it,” he says.
I huff a soft laugh and sit up slowly, pushing hair back from my face. The room opens around me, familiar already in a way that shouldn’t be possible after one night but is. The rug accepts my feet when I stand, that deep plush gives, and I pull the heaviest blanket around my shoulders and carry it with me to the window to pull the curtain back a few inches.
Morning light spills across the side garden, green and still, while the city hums somewhere beyond the fence line, softened by distance.
Behind me, I hear the mattress shift as Elias sits up.
I take one last look at the garden before letting the curtain fall closed.
“Ready to go to the kitchen?” he asks.
“Yep.” I drop the blanket around my shoulders on the bed and follow him toward the door.
The smell hits before we even reach the bottom of the stairs.
Coffee, strong and already brewed. Something warm is baking in the oven, and beneath it is a faint sweetness that feels familiar even if I can’t quite name it. Adrian is at the stove with his back to the doorway, and the ease with which he moves through the kitchen at seven in the morning is somehow deeply unsurprising. He’s already dressed, which tells me he’s had enough time to run through his whole routine before I came down. Bash is at the counter beside the sink, wiping somethingdry with a kitchen towel, his sleeves pushed up, his attention on the mug he’s cleaning.
Both of them look up when we appear.
Adrian’s expression shifts into something warmer immediately. “Morning,” he says and then turns back to the stove. “Eggs?”
“Please,” I say.
Bash sets the mug down and opens the cabinet beside him, already reaching for a coffee cup. He pours it without asking me how I take it. The oat milk comes from the back shelf. He slides it across the island toward me like this is something we do every morning. I curl my hands around the mug and let the warmth sink into my skin.
Elias takes the stool at the corner of the island, and I settle onto the one beside him. The kitchen settles into the sounds of morning: the soft hiss from the stove, the clink of plates, Bash and Adrian moving back and forth.
Adrian sets a plate in front of me and pulls up the stool on my other side, and for a few minutes nobody says much. Just the ordinary sounds of four people eating in a warm kitchen.
It’s Adrian who changes the atmosphere. He sets his fork down and folds his hands on the counter in front of him before speaking.
“I need to ask you something,” he says. “And I want you to hear that it’s a genuine question, not a setup.”
I look at him nervously.
“Do you want us to walk away from the production?”
The words sit there for a moment while I process them.
