Chapter 20 The Night Before Marcus Arrives

Chapter 20 The Night Before Marcus Arrives
POV: Wren

Dex's last words were still in the air when I walked away from both of them.
Not far. Just to the edge of the parking lot, far enough to put some space between me and the look on Dex's face when he said it, the one that had arranged itself into an accusation without quite committing to being one. I stood at the low concrete barrier at the lot's edge and looked out at the path beyond it and breathed.
Whoever Callum told.
I had told no one. Not Priya, not Carol, nothing about the bet pool specifics had left me in any direction. I knew that. The problem was that knowing it and being able to prove it to Dex in a parking lot at ten at night were two completely different things and the gap between them was exactly the size Marcus needed to slide something through.
Behind me I heard Callum talking to Dex, low and direct, and then footsteps, and then a car door, and then Dex was gone.
Callum came and stood beside me at the barrier.
We didn't go back to the office. Didn't talk about the draft or the coach or the report or any of it. He just started walking toward the library side of campus and I fell into step because standing in an empty parking lot felt worse than moving.
The bench outside the library was empty. Stone, cold, facing the small garden that nobody used after dark. He sat. I sat. Not close, not performing distance, just two people sitting on a bench because the night needed somewhere to be and this was it.
"He's been doing this my whole life," Callum said.
He wasn't looking at me. Looking out at the dark garden, elbows on his knees, voice at the volume you used when you were saying something you had said inside your head so many times it had worn a groove.
"Every time I found a way around something, he found the exit before I got there and closed it. Not with a fight. He doesn't fight." A pause. "He just removes the door and then acts surprised when you're still in the room."
I didn't say anything.
"Dex's mom." He stopped. Started again. "That's the part that." Another stop. He pressed his hands together between his knees. "Dex has nothing to do with any of this. His sister has nothing to do with any of this. And my father called his mother and collected information about their financial situation like it was research."
The garden was dark and still.
"He's tired," Callum said, and it took me a second to realise he meant Dex. "I could see it. He has been tired since before any of this started and now he's standing in a parking lot at ten at night with a formal warning incoming and his mom's phone number in my father's files."
I listened and didn't reach for a fix because there wasn't one I could hand him and he wasn't asking for one. He was saying the thing out loud because it needed to be out loud and I was the person sitting here.
That was enough. Just being the person sitting here.
At some point the gap between us on the bench closed. Not all at once, gradually, the way things shifted when two people had been sitting still long enough that the air between them stopped feeling like something to manage. His shoulder was against mine and I registered it and didn't move and neither did he and neither of us said anything about it.
"The draft," he said after a while.
"It's saved. Both versions."
"If he gets here tomorrow and moves on you the way he moved on Dex."
"He can't touch the draft," I said. "It's offsite, encrypted, and the sourcing is documented separately. Even if he got into every device I own he would find nothing he could use."
Callum turned his head slightly. "You planned for that."
"Week two," I said. "Right after the mailbox."
He looked back at the garden. Something in his shoulders changed, a small release, like a door letting go of a frame it had been pressed against.
"I'm tired," he said. Not performing it, not asking for a response. Just stating it the way he stated facts, directly and without decoration. The steady, accumulated kind of tired that didn't come from one night but from years of the same thing in different configurations.
"I know," I said.
We sat.
The campus around us was quiet in the specific way it got after ten, distant and settled, the kind of quiet that made small sounds carry. Somewhere across the path a door opened and closed. A bicycle went past on the far walkway. An owl, maybe, somewhere in the trees behind the garden, though I wasn't certain enough to call it that.
His shoulder stayed against mine.
I thought about the draft open on my laptop back in the office. I thought about Dex's face in the parking lot. I thought about Jamie somewhere with a prepaid and emails and a sister who had been followed home from school. I thought about Marcus on a plane or maybe not on a plane, maybe already closer than two days, maybe already in a car somewhere between the airport and here.
I was thinking about all of it and none of it at the same time and the bench was cold and the garden was dark and Callum's shoulder was solid against mine and none of those things were the same kind of thing but they were all happening at once.
Eleven o'clock came.
I know because my phone screen lit up with a notification in my pocket and I checked it without thinking and the time was there. 11:00.
Headlights came around the corner of the library path, slow and deliberate, a black car moving at the speed of something that wasn't in a hurry because it didn't need to be. It pulled to the kerb directly across from our bench and stopped.
The window came down.
A man looked at us. At me first, then at Callum, then at the space between us on the bench where the gap had closed without either of us deciding to close it.
Then the window went back up.
The car pulled away and was gone before I had fully processed that Marcus Voss had not waited for his flight.
He was already here.