Page 214 of Silent Shadows

“Miles, tell Daisy she deserves boundaries.”

“Miles, tell Daisy she can’t survive on iced coffee.”

“Miles, back me up here—editing it this way would be better, right?”

Seeing Miles in my apartment felt stranger than seeing Bigfoot in the wash. No exaggeration. There he was, opening cabinets for salt and pepper that don’t exist, standing barefoot on expensive hardwood floors in a T-shirt from Nevada’s Extraterrestrial Highway. Meanwhile, downtown LA blinked outside my windows like a different planet.

I watched him move through my space, instinctively bracing for discomfort. For the moment he’d feel too out of place—or I would. And I’d panic, realizing this was all a mistake.

But instead, he looked around once and said:

“You know what this place needs?”

Alarm bells. More monitors? Color-coded storage systems?

“What?”

“Plants.”

I stared. “You looked around my luxury apartment and thought: foliage.”

“It feels really… devoid of life.”

Three days later, there was foliage. Turns out he was right. That was the first step toward my apartment feeling more like home. Then shoes near the door. A mug that moved between the sink, the coffee table, and the nightstand. His sweatshirt draped over a chair. Maps spread across my kitchen island beside podcast notes. His glasses left somewhere, then him roaming around, blind, trying to find them. Me learning that he sleep-talks when stressed—mostly about batteries. Once about beef jerky. One deeply concerning incident involving “electronic voice phenomena.”

Love is wild. The strangest part, though? The future started sounding normal.

One night, standing barefoot in my kitchen eating Thai takeout straight out of the box, Miles looked up from his noodles and said, “What if we split time?”

I blinked, thinking he meant the space-time continuum. “What?”

He shrugged as if we were casually debating the virtues of pad thai versus pad see ew. “LA sometimes. Road sometimes. Oklahoma when we need to regroup.”

I kept staring, noodles hanging from my chopsticks mid-air.

“You like the road,” he added. “But you’re going to need a home base here to keep the business running, right? Also, your shower is life-changing.”

“You’re making long-term plans because of my shower?”

“Water pressure matters.”

I laughed so hard I nearly cried.

Then I realized he meant it. An actual future.

It would be messy but practical. And most of all, it would be real. Expeditions and coffee and missed exits and podcast deadlines and tiny bunk beds and random Tuesdays.

Us.

He caught my expression.

“What?”

Nothing. Everything. The terrifying knowledge that you want something enough to stay for it.

“You know,” I said, “you’re suspiciously calm about dating an undateable podcast host.”

He leaned back against the counter.