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He was quiet. She watched his face and braced for what she’d see there. Pity. Discomfort. The careful blankness of someone deciding she was crazy and figuring out how to leave without making it worse.

The one time she wanted to see patterns and her brain couldn’t find them. Like Fallon, Ryder had become too familiar.

She didn’t know what she was seeing. He was processing something, but she couldn’t read it.

“How do you cope with it?” he asked.

“I stay home. I work behind screens. I avoid crowds, I avoid strangers, I keep my world small.” She wrapped her hands around her mug. “When I do have to go out, I limit the input as much as possible. Keep my head down. Don’t look at people directly.”

She could see him working through it.

“The dark glasses you were wearing at the briefing,” he said slowly. “That’s not about migraines.”

“Not entirely. They help with those too, but that’s not why I wear them.” She met his eyes. “They’re dark enough that my brain can’t get traction on people’s details. If I can’t see someone’s face clearly, the cascade doesn’t start. Or it starts slower, enough for me to jerk myself out of it.”

“But in the briefing, even the glasses weren’t enough?”

She shrugged. “There were too many people all at once, and they were all too close. My brain overloaded and… Yeah. You were there. I wasn’t trying to be rude when Fallon introduced me. I just could hardly remain upright, much less get full sentences out.”

He leaned back in his chair, and she could see something shifting in him. Not pulling away. Recalibrating. Taking everything he’d seen over the past week and rearranging it around what she’d told him.

“The thing that makes me good at what I do is the same thing that destroys me around people,” she said. “I can’t have one without the other. There’s no fix.”

She stopped talking.

The kitchen was quiet. Just the refrigerator and the compound stirring outside and the sound of her own breathing. She’d said it. Out loud. To another human being.

The thing she’d carried alone for thirty years, the thing she’d hidden from Fallon, from every doctor, from every man she’d ever let close enough to matter, was sitting in the air between them, and she couldn’t pull it back in.

Her hands were trembling. She pressed them flat against the table and waited for whatever came next.

She couldn’t look at him. Not until she knew whether what she’d just told him had changed the way he saw her.

“I owe you an apology,” he said.

That was not what she’d expected.

“No, you don’t.”

“Yeah, I do.” He leaned forward. “I made judgments about you from the second you walked into that briefing. I looked at you and I took the surface read and I stopped. I decided you didn’t care. That the glasses were some kind of fashion choice. And I was wrong about all of it.”

“You didn’t know.”

“But I should’ve known there was something going on. Reading has always been the backbone of what I do. Every room I’ve ever been put in, every person who’s ever been put in front of me—” He stopped. His jaw worked.

She had no idea what he was talking about. His job for Zodiac Tactical? Maybe he meant undercover work.

“Anyway,” he continued. “I’ve never been so quick to follow a wrong assumption. Never taken one look at someone and decided I had the whole picture without probing deeper. I don’t do that. I’ve never done that. And I don’t know why I did it with you.”

The anger in his voice wasn’t directed at her. It was directed inward, and it ran deeper than a misjudged first impression should have warranted. She watched him struggle with it, and she could feel something underneath his words, some weight she didn’t have access to.

This wasn’t just about getting her wrong. This was about something fundamental to how he saw himself, and he was rattled by the failure in a way that didn’t quite match the scale of what he’d done.

She didn’t understand it. But she noticed. No pattern spiraling required.

“You moved past it,” she said. “That’s what matters.”

“Yeah, but I should’ve figured there was something more from the beginning. Rather than sitting in that briefing room being pissed about your sunglasses.”