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His eyes flick to mine.

“Not about being empty,” I add. My throat tightens, but I don’t look away. “Empty people don’t hurt like that. They don’t remember. They don’t keep pictures on walls or carry ghosts like they’re still breathing.”

I take another step closer. The floor creaks, betraying me, but I don’t stop.

“You talk like staying was the easier choice,” I say, and now my voice does waver. “Like it was cowardice. But you wake up every day in a world that has already proved it can take everything you love and not even apologize.”

I swallow hard.

“And you stay anyway.”

The words land heavier than anything he’s said.

“That’s not emptiness,” I whisper. “That’s endurance so deep it looks like punishment from the outside.”

I’m close enough now that I can see the strain in his face, the way grief has carved lines that never smoothed back out.

“I see it,” I say softly. “Even if you don’t.”

The silence settles again, thin and trembling, like it doesn’t know whether it’s allowed to stay.

So I reach for the man with more sharp edges knowing damn good and well the risk.

Not boldly. Not carefully enough to be afraid. I catch the edge of his sleeve between my fingers, right at his wrist, where the fabric is worn soft and the heat of him bleeds through. I don’t tug. I don’t ask. I just let my hand exist there, a quiet refusal to step back.

I stay silent. I let the contact speak for me.

My thumb presses once, small and deliberate, into the seam of his sleeve. Not comfort. Not forgiveness. Just presence.

A beat passes.

Then his hand shifts—slow, careful—and his fingers brush my knuckle, barely there. He doesn’t hold me. He doesn’t pull me closer. He just lets the connection remain, like he’s afraid claiming it might make it vanish.

It feels enormous anyway. Because this is a man who survived by letting go, and right now, he isn’t.

I tilt my head just enough that my words won’t carry, my voice low and rough with truth when I whisper, “I’m still pissed at you, you know.”

The corner of his mouth twitches—not a smile, but an opening. And the moment doesn’t pass. It roots, quiet and unmovable, like something finally allowed to exist.

XXXII

Not Yet

Ihaven’t been this far down the mountain since before the Reckoning.

The slope still leans too steep for comfort, shale skittering underfoot when you trust it too much, pine roots knuckling up through the dirt like bones that never bothered to hide. The air thins as we descend, cold enough to sting, sharp enough to feel earned. This side of the mountain feels older—less forgiving—like it remembers the world before everything learned how to rot out loud.

Back when we still believed the land would stay neutral.

The path isn’t marked. It never was. Just a narrow scar through the trees where feet learned the safest places to land and kept choosing them. My body remembers anyway—hips shifting, stride shortening, weight rolling outward on the slick parts. Muscle memory doesn’t ask permission.

Malek moves ahead of me, steady and unhurried, reading the mountain like it still answers to him. Shadow ghosts between us, nose low, ears flicking hard toward the trees. The woods are quiet in the wrong way—no insects, no night birds. Just wind sliding through needles and the slow creak of trees settling into themselves.

In the cabin, I’d thought I was seeing the limits of him. Out here, I understand I’ve only seen the part he allows to exist indoors.

Before the Reckoning, I noticed the signs around the farm.

Not markers you could name. No paint. No flags. Just small things that didn’t belong to chance—stones turned flat-side up where paths bent, lengths of wire tied and untied on the same fence posts, a single nail driven high into a tree trunk, useless for hanging anything. They showed up near the chicken coop, along the tree line, at the far edge of the pasture where the grass thinned and the world started paying attention back.