Chapter 78
Chapter 78
Mira’s POV
I woke up in Ace’s apartment to the smell of coffee.
For exactly three seconds before full consciousness arrived I was just a person waking up warm in a quiet room with morning light doing something gentle across the ceiling and nobody needing anything from me.
Then my brain caught up.
The surgery. Flora. Marlo’s unfinished sentence. The eight days that had quietly become seven overnight.
I sat up slowly.
Ace’s side of the bed was empty but recently so, the indent still there, sheets still warm. I sat on the edge and pressed my feet to the cold floor and breathed through the low persistent ache in my chest that greeted me every morning now like a housemate I hadn’t chosen.
“You don’t have to look like that,” Ace said from the doorway.
He was already dressed, holding two mugs, watching me with that quiet attention of his.
“Like what?” I replied.
“Like waking up somewhere safe is something you have to apologize for.”
I looked at him.
He crossed the room, handed me a mug, sat beside me on the edge of the bed and we drank our coffee in the morning quietly without filling it with anything unnecessary.
“I need to call Harrington’s office today,” I said eventually.
“I know.”
“And I need to go back to Zara’s before she files a missing persons report.”
“She texted you four times,” he confirmed. “I may have seen your phone light up.”
“Of course she did.” I wrapped both hands around my mug. “Ace.”
“Mm.”
“About the money.” I looked at him sideways. “I’ve been thinking about it.”
“Mira—”
“Let me finish.” I turned to face him properly. “I don’t want it to change things. Between us. Whatever this is.” I gestured vaguely at the space between us. “I don’t want to become something you funded. I’ve spent my whole life being something to someone and I need this to not be that.”
He looked at me for a long moment.
“You’re not something I funded,” he replied carefully. “You’re someone I’d like to still be sitting next to this time next year. The money is just the thing standing between now and then.” He held my gaze. “That’s all it is.”
I searched his face.
“Promise me,” I said quietly.
“I promise you,” he replied without hesitating.
I looked at him a moment longer.
Then I nodded.
“Okay,” I said.
Something in his expression settled.
He reached over and tucked my hair back, fingertips warm against my jaw, and pressed a brief kiss to my temple that landed somewhere it probably shouldn’t have given everything else currently occupying my chest.
“Go back to Zara’s,” he murmured. “Call Harrington. Come back tonight if you want.”
“You’re very sure of yourself,” I said.
“I’m very sure of you,” he corrected quietly.
I looked at him.
Filed that away under things I wasn’t examining until I had more time.
Finished my coffee and found my shoes and left before the morning could become something more complicated than I had capacity for.
Zara was waiting.
Not pacing, not panicked, just sitting on the couch with her legs crossed and her tea and an expression that said she had prepared a series of questions and had been rehearsing the order.
“Before you say anything,” I started.
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” she replied.
“You have your interrogation face on.”
“This is my normal face.”
“Zara.”
She put her tea down. “Did you sleep?”
“Yes.”
“Actually sleep or—”
“Actually sleep,” I confirmed.
Something softened in her expression briefly. “Good.” She picked her tea back up. “Marlo’s coming over later.”
“Again,” I noted pleasantly.
“He’s helping me with something.”
“With what.”
“Things,” she replied, which meant absolutely nothing and both of us knew it.
I sat down beside her.
“He almost told me something the other night,” I said. “Before you came back with the tea. He started a sentence and didn’t finish it.”
Zara’s hand stilled slightly around her mug.
Just slightly.
Just enough.
“What kind of sentence,” she asked, her voice carefully even in a way that was almost imperceptibly different from her normal voice.
I watched her profile.
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “He said there was a and then you came in.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“Did he say anything after?” she asked.
“No. He swallowed it back down.” I kept watching her face. “Do you know what he was going to say?”
She turned to look at me then, and her expression was doing something complicated, moving through several things quickly before settling into something neutral that didn’t entirely convince me.
“No idea,” she said.
She was lying.
Zara was many things but a good liar was not among them, not to me, not after all these years of knowing exactly what her face did when she was managing information she hadn’t decided what to do with yet.
I let it go.
For now.
“He’ll be here at seven,” she added, filling the silence.
“I know,” I replied.
And I sat there beside her and drank my coffee and watched her not look at me and filed that away alongside Marlo’s unfinished sentence and the specific quality of the silence that followed it.
Something was coming.
I could feel it the way you felt weather changing before the sky showed it, a pressure shift, a drop in temperature, something in the air that hadn’t been there before.
I just didn’t know yet how hard it was going to hit when it arrived.
My phone buzzed.
Flora.
Thinking about Sunday. About you. About the song. Sleep well my girl.
I stared at those last two words.
My girl.
She hadn’t called me that since I was small enough to sit on kitchen counters with my feet swinging, and seeing it on a screen in her handwriting, even digital handwriting, cracked something open in me so quietly and completely that I had to put the phone face down and look at the ceiling for a moment.
Zara glanced over.
Saw my face.
Didn’t ask.
Just reached over and squeezed my hand once, the way she did when words would only get in the way.
I squeezed back.
And we sat there together in the morning quiet while something enormous gathered itself just beyond the edges of everything and waited patiently for its moment.