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Now I had to get close.

I walked without a flashlight. There was enough moon to find the worn path, and I knew where the roots lifted it. Dad had walked this ground. Boone had. Wyatt did when he thought nobody saw him leave the office.

Calloways going somewhere quiet to avoid admitting that quiet had never fixed much.

At the footbridge, I stopped.

A pale band marked the stones above the water. Another inch gone, maybe. I crouched and put my fingers against the damp edge.

Cold.

Real.

Something I could measure.

I stayed there awhile.

Nothing without paper.

Every exit hers.

Priya had brought paper from the beginning.

Conditions. Boundaries. Things she needed named before she could stand under them.

I’d seen all that ink and thought it was the distance she put between herself and other people.

Maybe some of it was.

Maybe some of it was also a way in, laid out plainly for anybody willing to read instead of leaning on the locked door.

I stood and crossed the bridge.

There were things I needed to say.

Not that I’d wanted to kiss her. She knew that.

Not that she’d kissed me back. Bringing that up would only sound like evidence offered against her.

I needed to tell her I should have asked.

Tell her she could say she hadn’t wanted it, or had wanted it then and didn’t now. That neither answer changed the room, the work, or the coffee in the pot.

Then I needed to stop talking long enough to hear whatever came next.

Chapter 8

Priya

My first thought was that I had missed something.

Sunlight crossed the blanket in a broad white stripe. Not the thin gray light I usually worked through. Actual sunlight, warm against my wrist, showing every speck of dust on the windowsill.

I lifted my watch.

Eight forty-six.

“No.”