Chapter 189: Madeline
By morning, the house looks like a packing list exploded—chargers coiled on the table, field notebooks rubber-banded, my hard drive tucked into a zip pouch like it’s beating. After Jake’s call yesterday, he and Reid sat with Charlie and mapped it all, how it would work, who would go.
“Limited space,” Jake said, setting his phone on the table like it might ring again if he breathed too loud. “They want only the people who’ll work directly on the project.”
“Biologist goes,” Reid said without looking away from the map. “One of us goes.”
Jake tipped his chin at Charlie. “You in?”
She snorted. “Hard pass. I’m paperwork and Northhaven. You two can go be brilliant. I’ll keep the place from burning down.”
Reid nodded once. “Then it’s us and Madeline.”
Jake looked to the others. “You good a few days without both Andersons?”
Finn saluted. “Sir, yes sir.”
Liam said, “We’re adults,” and immediately knocked over a mug.
Sloane oddly seemed like the most eager to see them, and me, gone. Like she had been waiting for this moment.
I ran home after that—threw clothes in a duffel, slid my data into folders, copied it all twice because I couldn’t breathe until I did. Now the air tastes like coffee and wet wood. I hug Liam first; he spins me once and seems a little sad, like I’m leaving for good and not just a few days. Finn squeezes until my ribs complain and promises to “behave, mostly.” Charlie holds on the longest and murmurs, “Text me every time you remember to.” I promise. I mean it.
Reid’s car waits at the curb, washed and still somehow smelling like him—cedar, soap, rain. I hook my bag over my shoulder and reach for the back door.
“Passenger,” Jake calls, already loading the trunk.
“I’m fine in the back,” I start, but he’s shaking his head, easy.
“More space for me,” he says, deadpan, like he’s six-four and the backseat’s a shoebox (he is; it is).
I give in. The front seat is warm from the heater. Reid’s hands are on the wheel—tendons, veins, purpose. The windshield shows a town stitched back together overnight: branches stacked by curbs, tarps snapping, gulls heckling the harbor where broken floats bob like bad teeth. Jake drops in behind me; his knee bumps the back of my seat and stays there, steady pressure like an anchor.
I buckle. My folders sit in my lap, the institute’s email on top. Excited and terrified live in the same breath; I let them.
Reid glances over, that small, private curve to his mouth. “Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
He pulls away from the curb. Northhaven shrinks in the mirror—blue tarps, salt-grayed shingles, our people waving off the porch. Jake’s knuckles tap once against my shoulder from behind, a quiet you’ve got this I feel through bone.
We hit the road and the town falls away, and when I glance over, Reid’s wearing a grin I almost never see—wide, unguarded, trouble.
“What?” I ask, already smiling.
He shifts up a gear, eyes on the strip of black ahead. “I’m so fucking happy we have you all to ourselves for a bit.”
Heat flares low and mean. “Me too,” I say, and it comes out softer than I meant. Outside of Northhaven. Away from everyone’s eyes. Just… us.
Jake stretches in the back seat, knee still a warm press to my chair. “Long road,” he says. “Four hours, at least.”
“I can drive if you get tired,” I tell Reid, trying to sound practical. He just smirks.
“Two things,” Jake says, amused. “One—Reid could drive a whole day and not once look sleepy. Two—”
He points past my shoulder.
I turn and the highway has given up pretending to be a highway. The pavement narrows to a ribbon pinned to the edge of the world, cliffs dropping straight into slate-blue water. The road curls and curls—S after S after S—guardrails a suggestion, not a promise.
“Oh,” I say, gripping the door a little. “Okay. Maybe I won’t drive.”
They both chuckle—Reid’s low, pleased; Jake’s warm in my ear—and the car slides into the next curve like it was born knowing how. The heater hums. The ocean flashes and disappears. And between their laughter and the grin Reid still can’t quite hide, something in me loosens and heats, like the day has already decided to belong to us.
For the first hour it’s just the three of us trading small things—songs we hate, the exact right way to butter toast, the worst weather each of us has ever been caught in. Then it deepens without anyone deciding it should.
“Our mother taught us knots before numbers,” Reid says, mouth quirking. “Said one would save our lives faster.”
“Our dad taught us how to fight without throwing a punch,” Jake adds from the back seat. “Mostly by out-staring people twice our size.”
“Explains a lot,” I murmur, and Reid huffs a laugh.
They tell me about the first season of SWMRI—how the institute paperwork was filed on a dying laptop at the diner because the Wi-Fi was ‘almost free with coffee.’ How Charlie showed up with a clipboard and never left.
“She told us our invoices were crimes,” Jake says.
Reid nods. “And that ‘CEO’ wasn’t a personality.”
I laugh into my sleeve. “Thank God for Charlie.”
They ask about my parents and I give them the warm parts first. My mother who texted me every day of high school to remind me to eat lunch. My father who always drinks two glasses of milk too early in the morning. Summers on a coast that wasn’t this one, counting crabs and pretending it counted as research. The first time I looked through a microscope and thought: oh, there you are.
At one long, lonely stretch of road, Reid’s hand ghosts from the gearshift to my thigh like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Jake taps the back of my shoulder twice when he sees a view I should steal, and I snap a photo through the windshield—slate ocean, white scars of foam, the road scribbling S’s along the cliff.
It doesn’t feel like work. It feels like… this. Me and my two boyfriends in a car that smells like rain and coffee and us, talking about the lives we had and the one we might be building between these curves. The heater hums. The day opens. And when Reid glances over with that rare, bright grin, I realize the quiet in my chest isn’t silence—it’s belonging.