Page 72 of Make Them Pay

I don't stop anymore. I look as long as I want. The distance has been retired permanently, replaced by a proximity that still surprises me in the small moments: her toothbrush next to mine in the apartment bathroom, her shoes by the door, the sound of her typing in the next room while I make coffee in the kitchen.

"The intercept is set," she says. "We'll have the first capture within the next tidal window. About six hours."

"Good work."

"I know." She says it the same way she said it in the cabin the first time I told her that.

I reach over and take her hand. In the loft. In front of the crew. In front of Poe, who sees and doesn't comment and takes a pastry from the box and walks back to the briefing table where Dean’s waiting with a case file that will become someone's rescue.

Enley's fingers close around mine. Warm. Steady. The hand that cracked encryption under fire and mapped criminal empires and held mine in the dark of a storage unit when the distance between us finally reached zero.

She squeezes once. I squeeze back.

Outside the loft windows, the city does what the city does: moves, builds, continues. Somewhere in it, people are in trouble. People are being hurt by systems that are designed to hurt them and protected by structures that are designed to protect the people doing the hurting. Somewhere in it, a sixteen-year-old is on a screen and a family is looking for her and the bureaucratic process for saving a life is slower than the process for destroying one.

That's why we're here. That's why the loft exists and the crew exists and the work continues and the pastries arrive and the music plays too loud and the people in this room keep showing up.

We’ll keep showing up. All of us. The misfits and the professionals. The ghost and the hacker. The brother and the sister and the soldier and the friends who lost someone and chose to make the loss mean something instead of letting it mean nothing.

I hold Enley's hand in a room full of people who’ve been waiting for this particular piece of my life to finally fall into place, and I let the moment be what it is: simple, warm, and completely free of the distance that defined every other moment of my life before a woman in a container changed the math.

The work continues. The crew continues. We continue.

No distance. No gap. No wall.

Just this.