Page 65 of Make Them Pay

She goes still. That wasn’t what she expected.

“The night Poe activated the failsafe. The night I came for you at the warehouse. I almost didn’t come.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I sat in my car outside my apartment for eleven minutes before I started the engine. Eleven minutes of knowing you were in a container and that going to get you meant being close to you, responsible for you, and I wasn’t sure I could do that without losing the distance I’d been keeping for years. I wasn’t sure I could be near you and still be the person I needed to be to get you out.”

The confession hangs in the quiet cabin. I’ve never told anyone this. Eleven minutes of sitting still while the woman I was supposed to save waited in a box because I was afraid of what saving her would cost me.

“But you came,” she says.

“I came. Because the alternative was leaving you there, and that alternative didn’t exist for me any more than driving through Millhaven existed. It wasn’t really a choice. It was the absence of every other option.”

“So the distance wasn’t about not caring.”

“The distance was about caring so much that being close felt dangerous. Not to you. To me. To the version of myself I’d built around the idea that wanting something too much was a weakness. That if I let myself get close to you, the wanting would get in the way of the work. Of being the person the crew needed.”

“The ghost. The failsafe. The one who watches from the corner.”

“Yes.”

“And now?”

“Now I’ve spent ten days sleeping three feet from you, crossing rivers with you, building things with you, watching you solve problems I couldn’t solve, and making choices I couldn’t make. The version of me that lived in the corner doesn’t exist anymore. You took him apart. Not by trying. Just by being yourself so consistently that the distance I was keeping started looking obviously, completely stupid.”

The corner of her mouth lifts. That almost-smile I’ve been tracking since the first day.

“Structurally stupid,” she repeats.

“Architecturally indefensible.”

“Engineeringly absurd.”

“That’s not a word.”

“It should be. We should petition.”

We’re doing the lighter thing that lives between the heavy conversations. The banter that isn’t just flirtation but the actual texture of two people who like being around each other in a way that makes a room feel smaller and warmer when both of them are in it.

She unfolds from the tight position on the bed, stretches her legs out, and leans back on her hands. The posture is open in a way she hasn’t been since the cabin, maybe longer. The posture of someone who doesn’t need to guard herself in this room.

“My turn,” she says.

“Go.”

“I’ve been in love with you since the diner. The one where I used to steal your fries. I was nineteen. You were sitting in the corner booth with your laptop and your coffee and you looked up when I walked in and for about half a second your face did something it never does. It opened. Like a door that’s usually locked. Then it closed again and you went back to the screen and I spent the rest of the night trying to make it happen again and failing every single time.”

“The fries.”

“The fries were strategy. If I stole your food, you had to look at me. Even if it was just to look annoyed. Annoyed was better than invisible. Anything was better than invisible.”

“You were never invisible.” My voice comes out raspy.

“I know that now. But I didn’t know it then. All I knew was that the man in the corner booth watched everyone else in the room and somehow never watched me, and the not-watching felt like the loudest thing in every room we shared.”

“I was always watching. I was just better at hiding it than you were at stealing fries.”

She laughs. A real laugh. Not the careful almost-laughs I’ve heard over the past ten days. A full, free sound that fills the small cabin and makes the golden light feel like it’s part of the moment.